History of English literature;

HISTORY

OF

ENGLISH LITERATURE

EDMUND SPEXSER.

LE.W

E^S HISTORY

OF

ENGLISH LITERATURE

.v? V BY
H/ A; TAINE, D.C.L.

TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH
BY H. VAN LAUN

WITH THIRTY-TWO PORTRAITS

IN FOUR VOLUMES
VOLUME I

LONDON

OHATTO & WINDUS
1920

PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION.

THIS edition of Taine's History of English Literature
has been carefully revised and compared with the
original. All the quotations have been collated and
verified anew, and no trouble has been spared to make
it as accurate as possible.

For the favourable reception this translation has
met with from the press and the public, I feel much
indebted.

H. VAU LAUN.

THE ACADEMY.
EDINBURGH, May 31, 1873.

CONTENTS.

INTRODUCTION.

PAOS

Historical documents serve only as a clue to reconstruct

the visible individual ...... 2

The outer man is only a clue to study the inner, invisible

man . . . . . . . . . (I

The state and the actions of the inner and invisible man
have their causes in certain general ways of thought
and feeling ........ 10

Chief causes of thoughts and feelings. Their historical

effects 13

The three primordial forces —

i. Race 17

IT. Surroundings . . . . . . .19

m. Epoch 21

History is a mechanical and psychological problem.

Within certain limits man can foretell . . .23

Production of the results of a primordial cause. Common
elements. Composition of groups. Law of mutual
dependence. Law of proportional influences . . 25

Law of formation of a group. Examples and indications . 30

General problem and future of history. Psychological
method. Value of literature. Purpose in writing
this book 32

viif CONTENTS.

BOOK L— THE SOURCE.

CHAPTER L

8£tjE Saxons.

MM

L Their original country — Soil, sea, sky, climate —
Their new country — A moist land and a thank-
less soil— Influence of climate on character . 37

ii. Their bodily structure — Food — Manners — Unculti-

vated instincts, German and English . . 41

ni. Noble instincts in Germany — The iiidividual — The
family — The state — Religion — The Edda—
Tragi-heroic conception of the world and of man-
kind ........ 49

iv. Noble instincts in England — Warrior and chieftain
— Husband and wife — The poem of Beowulf —
Barbarian society and the barbarian hero . . 58

v. Pagan poems — Kind and force of sentiments — Bent
of mind and speech — Force of impression ; harsh-
ness of expression . ... . .68

vi. Christian poems — Wherein the Saxons are predis-
posed to Christianity — How converted — Their
view of Christianity — Hymns of Csedmon —
Funeral hymn — Poem of Judith — Paraphrase of
the Bible ....... 72

vii. Why Latin culture took no hold on the Saxons —
Reasons drawn from the Saxon conquest — Bede,
Alcuin, Alfred — Translations — Chronicles —
Compilations — Impotence of Latin writers —
Reasons drawn from the Saxon character —
Adhelm — Alcuin — Latin verse — Poetic dia-
logues—Bad taste of the Latin writers . . 82

CONTENTS. ix

PAOB

Contrast of German and Latin races — Character of
the Saxon race — Its endurance under the Nor-
man conquest .... 92

CHAPTEE II.

i. Formation and character of Feudalism ... 95

IL The Norman invasion ; character of the Normans
— Contrast with the Saxons — The Normans are
French — How they became so — Their taste and
architecture — Their spirit of inquiry and their
literature — Chivalry and amusements — Their
tactics and their success . . . . .96

ui. Bent of the French genius — Two principal charac-
teristics ; clear and consecutive ideas — Psycho-
logical form of French genius — Prosaic histories ;
lack of colour and passion, ease and discursive-
ness — Natural logic and clearness, soberness,
grace and delicacy, refinement and cynicism —
Order and charm — The nature of the beauty and
of the ideas which the French have introduced . 104

iv. The Normans in England — Their position and their
tyranny — They implant their literature and
language — They forget the same — Learn English
by degrees — Gradually English becomes galli-
cised . ..... 115

v. They translate French works into English — Opinion
of Sir John Mandeville — Layamon, Robert of
Gloucester, Robert de Brunne — They imitate in
English the French literature — Moral manuals,
chansons, fabliaux, Gestes — Brightness, frivolity,
and futility of this French literature — Barbarity
and ignorance of the feudal civilisation — Geste

x CONTENTS.

PAGE

of Richard Coeur de Lion, and voyages of Sir
John Mandeville — Poorness of the literature in-
troduced and implanted in England — Why it has
not endured on the Continent or in England . 121

VL The Saxons in England — Endurance of the Saxon
nation, and formation of the English constitution
— Endurance of the Saxon character, and forma-
tion of the English character . . . .138

vii.- ix. Comparison of the ideal hero in France and
England — Fabliaux of Reynard, and ballads of
Robin Hood — How the Saxon character makes
way for and supports political liberty — Compa-
rison of the condition of the Commons in France
and England — Theory of the English constitu-
tion, by Sir John Fortescue — How the Saxon
constitution makes way for and supports political
liberty — Situation of the Church, and precursors
of the Reformation in England — Piers Plowman
and Wycliffe — How the Saxon character and the
situation of the Norman Church made way for
religious reform — Incompleteness and importance
of the national literature — Why it has not
endured 145

CHAPTER IIL

tongue.

i. Chaucer — His education — His political and social
life — Wherein his talent was serviceable — He
paints the second feudal society . . .170

n. How the middle age degenerated — Decline of the
serious element in manners, books, and works of
art — Need of excitement — Analogies of archi-
tecture and literature . 171

CONTENTS. xi

PA OB

m. Wherein Chaucer belongs to the middle -age —
Romantic and ornamental poems — Le Roman de
la Rose — Troilus and Cressida — Canterbury Tales
— Order of description and events — The House of
fame — Fantastic dreams and visions — Love
poems — Troilus and Cressida — Exaggerated de-
velopment of love in the middle age — Why the
mind took this path — Mystic love — The Flower
and the Leaf — Sensual love — Troilus and Cressida 1 73

iv. Wherein Chaucer is French — Satirical and jovial
poems — Canterbury Tales — The Wife of Bath and
marriage — The mendicant friar and religion —
Buffoonery, waggery, and coarseness in the
middle-age 193

v Wherein Chaucer was English and original — Idea
of character and individual — Van Eyck and
Chaucer contemporary — Prologue to Canterbury
Tales — Portraits of the franklin, monk, miller,
citizen, knight, squire, prioress, the good clerk —
Connection of events and characters — General
idea — Importance of the same — Chaucer a pre-
cursor of the Reformation — He halts by the way
— Tediousness and Childishness — Causes of this
feebleness — His prose, and scholastic notion —
How he is isolated in his age .... 203

vi. Connection of philosophy and poetry — How general
notions failed under the scholastic philosophy —
Why poetry failed — Comparison of civilisation
and decadence in the middle age, and in Spain —
Extinction of the English literature — Translators
— Rhyming chroniclers — Didactic poets — Com-
pilers of moralities — Gower — Occleve — Lydgate
Analogy of taste in costumes, buildings, and
literature — Sad notion of fate, and human misery
— Hawes — Barclay — Skelton — Elements of the
Reformation and of the Renaissance 213

rii CONTENTS.

BOOK IL— THE RENAISSANCE

CHAPTEK I.

Pagan i&enaissance.

§ 1. MANNERS OF THE TIME.

PA ay

L Idea which men had formed of the world, since the
dissolution of the old society — How and why
human inventiveness reappears — The form of the
spirit of the Renaissance — The representation of
objects is imitative, characteristic, and complete 227

n. Why the ideal changes — Improvement of the state
of man in Europe — In England — Peace — In-
dustry — Commerce — Pasturage — Agriculture —
Growth of public wealth — Buildings and furni-
ture — The palace, meals and habits — Court
pageantries — Celebrations under Elizabeth —
Masques under James I. . . . .230

in. Manners of the people — Pageants — Theatres — Vil-

lage feasts — Pagan development . . .239

rv. Models — The ancients — Translation and study of
classical authors — Sympathy for the manners and
mythology of the ancients — The moderns — Taste
for Italian writings and ideas — Poetry and
painting in Italy were pagan — The ideal is the
strong and happy man, limited by the present
life ...... . 243

§ 2. POETRY.

L The English Renaissance is the Renaissance of the

Saxon genius ...... 250

n. The forerunners — The Earl of Surrey — His feudal
and chivalrous life — His English individual

CONTENTS. xiii

PAOC

character — His serious and melancholy poems —

His conception of iiiward love . . . .250

m. His style — His masters, Petrarch and Virgil — His
progress, power, precocious perfection — Birth of
art — Weaknesses, imitation, research — Art in-
complete 256

IV. Growth and completion of art — Euphues and fashion

— Style and spirit of the Kenaissance — Copious-
ness and irregularity — How manners, style, and
spirit correspond — Sir Philip Sydney — His edu-
cation, life, character — His learning, gravity,
generosity, forcible expression — The Arcadia —
Exaggeration and mannerism of sentiments and
style — Defence of Poesie — Eloquence and energy —
His sonnets — Wherein the body and the passions
of the Renaissance differ from those of the
moderns — Sensual love — Mystical love . .259

V. Pastoral poetry — The great number of poets — Spirit

and force of the poetry — State of mind which
produces it — Love of the country — Reappearance
of the ancient gods — Enthusiasm for beauty —
Picture of ingenuous and happy love — Shaks-
peare, Jonson, Fletcher, Drayton, Marlowe,
Warner, Breton, Lodge, Greene — How the trans-
formation of the people transforms art . . 276

71. Ideal poetry — Spenser — His life — His character —
His platonism — His Hymns of love and beauty —
Copiousness of his imagination — How far it was
suited for the epic — Wherein it was allied to the
"faerie " — His tentatives — Shepherd's Calendar —
His short poems — His masterpiece — The Faerie
Queene — His epic is allegorical and yet life-like —
It embraces Christian chivalry and the Pagan
Olympus — How it combines these . . . 289

riv CONTENTS.

PAGE

vti. The Fafrie Queene — Impossible events — How they
appear natural — Belphosbe and Chrysogone — Fairy
and gigantic pictures and landscapes — TV hy they
must be so — The cave of Mammon, and the
gardens of Acrasia — How Spenser composes —
Wherein the art of the Renaissance is complete 300

§ 3. PROSE.

L Limit of the poetry — Changes in society and manners

— How the return to nature becomes an appeal
to the senses — Corresponding changes in poetry —
How agreeableness replaces energy — How pretti-
ness replaces the beautiful — Refinements —
Carew, Suckling, Herrick — Affectation — Quarles,
Herbert, Babington, Donne, Cowley — Beginning

of the classic style, and drawing-room life . 321

u. How poetry passed into prose — Connection of science
and art — In Italy — In England — How the
triumph of nature develops the exercise of the
natural reason — Scholars, historians, speakers,
compilers, politicians, antiquaries, philosophers,
theologians — The abundance of talent, and the
rarity of fine works — Superfluousness, punctili-
ousness, and pedantry of the style — Originality,
precision, energy, and richness of the style —
How, unlike the classical writers, they represent
the individual, not the idea . . . .330

m. Robert Burton — His life and character — Vastness
and confusion of his acquirements — His subject,
the Anatomy of Melancholy — Scholastic division?

— Medley of moral and medical science . .336

rv. Sir Thomas Browne — His talent — His imagination
ia that of a North-man — ffydriotaphia, Religio

CONTENTS. rv

PAGE

Medici — His ideas, curiosity, and doubts belong
to the age of the Renaissance — Pseudodoxia —
Effects -of this activity and this direction of the
public mind ....... 343

v. Francis Bacon — His talent — His originality — Con-
centration and brightness of his style — Compari-
sons and aphorisms — The Essays — His style not
argumentative, but intuitive — His practical good
sense — Turning-point of his philosophy — The
object of science is the amelioration of the
condition of man — New Atlantis — The idea is in
accordance with the state of affairs and the spirit
of the times — It completes the Renaissance — It
introduces a new method — The Organum —
Where Bacon stopped — Limits of the spirit of
the age — How the conception of the world,
which had been poetic, became mechanical —
How the Renaissance ended in the establishment
of positive science . . . . . .347

CHAPTER IL

&fje ftfjeatre.

i. The public— The stage 360

ii. Manners of the sixteenth century — Violent and

complete expansion of nature . . . .363

in. English manners — Expansion of the energetic and

gloomy character . . . . .373

iv. The poets — General harmony between the character
of a poet and that of his age — Nash, Decker,
Kyd, Peele, Lodge, Greene — Their condition and
life — Marlowe — His life — His works— Tambwr-

*Yi CONTENTS.

PACE

laine — The Jew of Malta — Edward II. — Faustus

— His conception of man . . . 380

7. Formation of this drama — The process and charac-
ter of this art — Imitative sympathy, which
depicts by expressive examples — Contrast of
classical and Germanic art — Psychological con-
struction and proper sphere of these two arts . 397

VL Male characters — Furious passions — Tragical events
— Exaggerated characters — The Duke of Milan by
Massinger — Ford's Annabella — Webster's Duchess
of Malfi and Vittoria, Gorombona — Female charac-
ters— Germanic idea of love and marriage —
Euphrasia, Bianca, Arethusa, Ordella, Aspasia
Amoret, in Beaumont and Fletcher — Penthea in
Ford — Agreement of the moral and physical type 404

PORTRAITS.

Edmund Spenser Frontispiece

Geoffrey Chaucer . 142

Sir Philip Sidney 262

Robert Herrick 324

Sir Thomas Browne ....... 344

Francis Bacon ........ 348

Francis Beaumont . . . . . . .418

John Fletcher , ... 428

INTRODUCTION.

The historian might place himself for a given period, say a series of ages,
or in the human soul, or with some particular people ; he might
study, describe, relate, all the events, all the transformations, all the
revolutions which had been accomplished in the internal man ; and
when he had finished his work, he would have a history of civilisa-
tion amongst the people and in the period he had selected. — GUIZOT,
Civilisation in Europe, p. 25.

HISTORY has been transformed, within a hundred years
in Germany, within sixty years in France, and that by
the study of their literatures.

It was perceived that a literary work is not a mere
individual play of imagination, the isolated caprice of
an excited brain, but a transcript of contemporary
manners, a manifestation of a certain kind of mind. It
was concluded that we might recover, from the monu-
ments of literature, a knowledge of the manner in which
men thought and felt centuries ago. The attempt was
made, and it succeeded.

Pondering on these modes of feeling and thought,
men decided that they were facts of the highest kind.
They saw that these facts bore reference to the most
important' occurrences, that they explained and were
explained by them, that it was necessary thenceforth
to give them a rank, and a most important rank, in his-
tory. This rank they have received, and from that
moment history has undergone a complete change : in
its subject-matter, its system, its machinery, the appre-

VOL. T. B

2 INTRODUCTION.

elation of laws and of causes. It is this change, such
as it is and must be, that we shall here endeavour to
exhibit.

I.

What is your first remark on turning over the great,
stiff leaves of a folio, the yellow sheets of a manuscript,
— a poem, a code of laws, a confession of faith ? This,
you say, did not come into existence all alone. It is but
a mould, like a fossil shell, an imprint, like one of those
shapes embossed in stone by an animal which lived and
perished. Under the shell there was an animal, and
behind the document there was a man. Why do you
study the shell, except to bring before you the animal ?
So you study the document only to know the man. The
shell and the document are lifeless wrecks, valuable only
as a clue to the entire and living existence. We must get
hold of this existence, endeavour to re-create it. It is a
mistake to study the document, as if it were isolated.
This were to treat things like a simple scholar, to fall
into the error of the bibliomaniac. Neither mythology
nor languages exist in themselves ; but only men, who
arrange words and imagery according to the necessities
of their organs and the original bent of their intellects.
A dogma is nothing in itself; look at the people who
have made it, — a portrait, for instance, of the sixteenth
century, say the stern powerful face of an English arch-
bishop or martyr. Nothing exists except through some
individual man ; it is this individual with whom we
must become acquainted. When we have established
the parentage of dogmas, or the classification of poems,
or the progress of constitutions, or the transformation of
idioms, we have only cleared the soil : genuine history
is brought into existence only when the historian begins

INTRODUCTION. 3

to unravel, across the lapse of time, the living man,
toiling, impassioned, entrenched in his customs, with
his voice and features, his gestures and his dress, distinct
and complete as he from whom we have just parted in
the street. Let us endeavour, then, to annihilate as
far as possible this great interval of time, which prevents
us from seeing man with our eyes, with the eyes of our
head. What have we under the fair glazed pages of a
modern poem ? A modern poet, who has studied and
travelled, a man like Alfred de Musset, Victor Hugo,
Lamartine, or Heine, in a black coat and gloves, wel-
comed by the ladies, and making every evening his fifty
bows and Ms score of bon-mots in society, reading the
papers in the morning, lodging as a rule on a second
floor ; not over gay, because he has nerves, and especi-
ally because, in this dense democracy where we choke
one another, the discredit of the dignities of office has
exaggerated his pretensions while increasing his im-
portance, and because the keenness of his feelings in
general disposes him somewhat to believe himself a
deity. This is what we take note of under modern
Meditations or Sonnets. Even so, under a tragedy of
the seventeenth century we have a poet, like Racine
for instance, elegant, staid, a courtier, a fine talker,
with a majestic wig and ribboned shoes, at heart a
royalist and a Christian, who says, " God has been so
gracious to me, that in whatever company I find my-
self I never have occasion to blush for the gospel or the
king ;"1 clever at entertaining the prince, and rendering

1 Mary Wollstonecraft, in her Historical and Moral View of the
French Revolution, p. 25, says, in quoting this passage, "What could
be expected from the courtier who could write in these terms to Madame
de Maintenon." — TR

4 INTRODUCTION.

for him into good French the " old French of Amyot ;"
very respectful to the great, always " knowing his place;"
as assiduous and reserved at Marly as at Versailles,
amidst the regular pleasures of polished and ornate
nature, amidst the salutations, graces, airs, and fopperies
of the braided lords, who rose early in the morning to
obtain the promise of being appointed to some office in
case of the death of the present holder, and amongst
charming ladies who count their genealogies on their
fingers in order to obtain the right of sitting down in the
presence of the King or Queen. On that head consult
St. Simon and the engravings of Pe*relle, as for the
present age you have consulted Balzac and the water-
colours of Eugene Lami. Similarly, when we read a
Greek tragedy, our first care should be to realise to
ourselves the Greeks, that is, the men who live half
naked, in the gymnasia, or in the public squares, under
a glowing sky, face to face with the most beautiful and
the most noble landscapes, bent on making their bodies
lithe and strong, on conversing, discussing, voting, carry-
ing on patriotic piracies, nevertheless lazy and temperate,
with three urns for their furniture, two anchovies in a
jar of oil for their food, waited on by slaves, so as to
give them leisure to cultivate their understanding and
exercise their limbs, with no desire beyond that of having
the most beautiful town, the most beautiful processions,
the most beautiful ideas, the most beautiful men. On
this subject, a statue such as the Meleager or the Theseus
of the Parthenon, or still more, the sight of the Mediter-
ranean, blue and lustrous as a silken tunic, and the islands
that stud it with their massive marble outlines : add
to these twenty select phrases from Plato and Aristo-
phanes, and they will teach you much more than a multi-

INTRODUCTION. 5

tude of dissertations and commentaries And so again, in
order to understand an Indian Parana, begin by imagin-
ing to yourself the father of a family, who, " having seen
a son on his son's knees," retires, according to the law,
into solitude, with an axe and a pitcher under a banyan
tree, by the brook-side, talks no more, adds fast to
fast, dwells naked between four fires, and under that
terrible sun, which devours and renews without end
all things living ; who, for weeks at a time, fixes his
imagination first upon the feet of Brahma, next upon
his knee, next upon his thigh, next upon his navel,
and so on, until, beneath the strain of this intense
meditation, hallucinations begin to appear, until all
the forms of existence, mingled and transformed the
one with the other, quaver before a sight dazzled and
giddy, until the motionless man, catching in his breath,
with fixed gaze, beholds the universe vanishing like a
smoke in the universal void of Being into which he
hopes to be absorbed. To this end a voyage to India
would, be the best instructor ; or for want of better,
the accounts of travellers, books of geography, botany,
ethnology, will serve their turn. In each case the
search must be the same. Language, legislation,
creeds, are only abstract things : the complete thing
is the man who acts, the man corporeal and visible,
who eats, walks, fights, labours. Leave aside the
theory and the mechanism of constitutions, religions
and their systems, and try to see men in their work-
shops, in their offices, in their fields, with their sky
and soil, their houses, their dress, cultivations, meals,
as you do when, landing in England or Italy, you look
at faces and motions, roads and inns, a citizen taking
his walk, a workman drinking. Our great care should

6 INTRODUCTION.

be to supply as much as possible the want of present,
personal, direct, and sensible observation which we can
no longer practise ; for it is the only means of knowing
men. Let us make the past present : in order to judge
of a thing, it must be before us ; there is no experience in
respect of what is absent. Doubtless this reconstruc-
tion is always incomplete ; it can produce only incom-
plete judgments ; but that we cannot help. It is better
to have an imperfect knowledge than none at all ; and
there is no other means of acquainting ourselves ap-
proximately with the events of other days, than to see
approximately the men of other days.

This is the first step in history; it was made in
Europe at the revival of imagination, toward the close
of the last century, by Lessing and Walter Scott ; a little
later in France, by Chateaubriand, Augustin Thierry,
Michelet, and others. And now for the second step.

II.

When you consider with your eyes the visible man,
what do you look for ? The man invisible. The words
which enter your ears, the gestures, the motions of his
head, the clothes he wears, visible acts and deeds of
every kind, are expressions merely ; somewhat is revealed
beneath them, and that is a soul. An inner man is con-
cealed beneath the outer man; the second does but
reveal the first. You look at his house, furniture, dress ;
and that in order to discover in them the marks of his
habits and tastes, the degree of his refinement or
rusticity, his extravagance or his economy, his stupidity
or his acuteness. You listen to his conversation, and
you note the inflexions of his voice, the changes in his

INTRODUCTION. 7

attitudes ; and that in order to judge of his vivacity, his
self-forgetfulness or his gaiety, his energy or his con-
straint. You consider his writings, his artistic produc-
tions, his business transactions or political ventures ;
and that in order to measure the scope and limits of
his intelligence, his inventiveness, his coolness, to find
out the order, the character, the general force of his
ideas, the mode in which he thinks and resolves. All
these externals are but avenues converging towards a
centre ; you enter them simply in order to reach that
centre ; and that centre is the genuine man, I mean
that mass of faculties and feelings which are the inner
man. We have reached a new world, which is infinite,
because every action which we see involves an infinite
association of reasonings, emotions, sensations new and
old, which have served to bring it to light, and which,
like great rocks deep-seated in the ground, find in it
their end and their level. This underworld is a new
subject-matter, proper to the historian. If his critical
education is sufficient, he can lay bare, under every
detail of architecture, every stroke in a picture, every
phrase in a writing, the special sensation whence detail,
stroke, or phrase had issue ; he is present at the drama
which was enacted in the soul of artist or writer ; the
choice of a word, the brevity or length of a sentence, the
nature of a metaphor, the accent of a verse, the devel-
opment of an argument — everything is a symbol to
him ; while his eyes read the text, his soul and mind
pursue the continuous development and the everchanging
succession of the emotions and conceptions out of which
the text has sprung: in short, he works out its psychology.
If you would observe this operation, consider the origin-
ator and model of all grand contemporary culture, Goetha

8 INTRODUCTION.

who, before writing Iphigenia, employed day after day in
making drawings of the most finished statues, and who
at last, his eyes filled with the noble forms of ancient
scenery, his mind penetrated by the harmonious loveli-
ness of antique life, succeeded in reproducing so exactly
in himself the habits and peculiarities of the Greek
imagination, that he gives us almost the twin sister of
the Antigone of Sophocles, and the goddesses of Phidias.
This precise and proved interpretation of past sensa-
tions has given to history, in our days, a second birth ;
hardly anything of the sort was known to the preceding
century. They thought men of every race and century
were all but identical ; the Greek, the barbarian, the
Hindoo, the man of the Renaissance, and the man of
the eighteenth century, as if they had been turned out
of a common mould ; and all in conformity to a certain
abstract conception, which served for the whole human
race. They knew man, but not men ; they had not
penetrated to the soul ; they had not seen the infinite
diversity and marvellous complexity of souls ; they did
not know that the moral constitution of a people or an
age is as particular and distinct as the physical structure
of a family of plants or an order of animals. Now-a-
days, history, like zoology, has found its anatomy ; and
whatever the branch of history to which you devote your-
self, philology, linguistic lore, mythology, it is by these
means you must strive to produce new fruit. Amid
so many writers who, since the time of Herder, Ottfried
Miiller, and Goethe, have continued and still improve
this great method, let the reader consider only two his-
torians and two works, Carlyle's Cromwell, and Sainte-
Beuve's Port-Royal : he will see with what fairness,
exactness, depth qf insight, a man may discover a souJ

INTRODUCTION. 9

beneath its actions and its works ; how behind the old
general, in place of a vulgar hypocritical schemer, we re-
cover a man troubled with the obscure reveries of a
melancholic imagination, but with practical instincts and
faculties, English to the core, strange and incomprehen-
sible to one who has not studied the climate and the race ;
how, with about a hundred meagre letters and a score of
mutilated speeches, we may follow him from his farm
and team, to the general's tent and to the Protector's
throne, in his transmutation and development, in his
pricks of conscience and his political sagacity, until the
machinery of his mind and actions becomes visible, and
the inner tragedy, ever changing and renewed, which
exercised this great, darkling soul, passes, like one of
Shakspeare's, through the soul of the looker-on. He
will see (in the other case) how, behind the .squabbles
of the monastery, or the contumacies of nuns, he may
find a great province of human psychology ; how about
fifty characters, that had been buried under the uni-
formity of a circumspect narrative, reappear in the light
of day, each with its own specialty and its countless
diversities ; how, beneath theological disquisitions and
monotonous sermons, we can unearth the beatings of
living hearts, the convulsions and apathies of monastic
life, the unforeseen reassertions and wavy turmoil of
nature, the inroads of surrounding worldliness, the inter-
mittent victories of grace, with such a variety of lights
and shades, that the most exhaustive description and the
most elastic style can hardly gather the inexhaustible
harvest, which the critic has caused to spring up on this
abandoned field. And so it is throughout. Germany
with its genius so pliant, so comprehensive, so apt foi
transformation, so well calculated to reproduce the most

10 INTRODUCTION.

remote and anomalous conditions of human thought ;
England, with its intellect so precise, so well calculated
to grapple closely with moral questions, to render them
exact by figures, weights and measures, geography, statis-
tics, by quotation and by common sense ; France, with
her Parisian culture, with her drawing-room manners,
with her untiring analysis of characters and actions, her
irony so ready to hit upon a weakness, her finesse so
practised in the discrimination of shades of thought ; —
all have worked the same soil, and we begin to under-
stand that there is no region of history where it is not
imperative to till this deep level, if we would see a
serviceable harvest rise between the furrows.

This is the second step ; we are in a fair way to its
completion. It is the fit work of the contemporary
critic. No one has done it so justly and grandly as
Sainte-Beuve : in this respect we are all his pupils ; his
method has revolutionised, in our days, in books, and
even in newspapers, every kind of literary, of philosophi-
cal and religious criticism. From it we must set out in
order to begin the further development. I have more
than once endeavoured to indicate this development;
there is here, in my mind, a new path open to history
and I will try to describe it more in detail.

III.

When you have observed and noted in man one,
two, three, then a multitude of sensations, does this
suffice, or does your knowledge appear complete ? Is
Psychology only a series of observations ? No ; here
as elsewhere we must search out the causes after we
have collected the facts. No matter if the facts be

INTRODUCTION. 11

physical or moral, they all have their causes ; there is
a cause for ambition, for courage, for truth, as there
is for digestion, for muscular movement, for animal
heat. Vice and virtue are products, like vitriol and
sugar ; and every complex phenomenon arises from other
more simple phenomena on which it hangs. Let us
then seek the simple phenomena for moral qualities, as
we seek them for physical qualities; and let us take
the first fact that presents itself : for example, religious
music, that of a Protestant Church. There is an inner
cause which has turned the spirit of the faithful toward
these grave and nfonotonous melodies, a cause broader
than its effect ; I mean the general idea of the true, ex-
ternal worship which man owes to God. It is this which
has modelled the architecture of Protestant places of
worship, thrown down the statues, removed the pictures,
destroyed the ornaments, curtailed the ceremonies, shut
up the worshippers in high pews which prevent them
from seeing anything, and regulated the thousand details
of decoration, posture, and general externals. This
again comes from another more general cause, the idea
of human conduct in all its comprehensiveness, in-
ternal and external, prayers, actions, duties of every
kind which man owes to God ; it is this which has
enthroned the doctrine of grace, lowered the status
of the clergy, transformed the sacraments, suppressed
various practices, and changed religion from a discipline
to a morality. This second idea in its turn depends
upon a third still more general, that of moral perfection,
such as is met with in the perfect God, the unerring
judge, the stern watcher of souls, before whom every
soul is sinful, worthy of punishment, incapable of virtue
or salvation, except by the power of conscience which

12 INTRODUCTION.

He calls forth, and the renewal of heart which He pro-
duces. That is the master idea, which consists in
erecting duty into an absolute king of human life, and
in prostrating all ideal models before a moral model.
Here we track the root of man ; for to explain this
conception it is necessary to consider the race itself,
the German and Northman, the structure of his cha-
racter and mind, his general processes of thought
and feeling, the sluggishness and coldness of sensation
which prevent his falling easily and headlong under
the sway of pleasure, the bluntness of his taste, the
irregularity and revolutions of his" conception, which
arrest in him the birth of fair dispositions and harmoni-
ous forms, the disdain of appearances, the desire for truth,
the attachment to bare and abstract ideas, which develop
in him conscience, at the expense of all else. There
the search is at an end ; we have arrived at a primitive
disposition ; at a feature peculiar to all the sensations,
and to all the conceptions of a century or a race, at a par-
ticularity inseparable from all the motions of his intellect
and his heart. Here lie the grand causes, for they are
the universal and permanent causes, present at every
moment and in every case, everywhere and always
acting, indestructible, and finally infallibly supreme,
since the accidents which thwart them, being limited
and partial, end by yielding to the dull and incessant
repetition of their efforts : in such a manner that the
general structure of things, and the grand features of
events, are their work ; and religions, philosophies,
poetries, industries, the framework of society and of
families, are in fact only the imprints stamped by their

INTRODUCTION. 13

IV.

There is, then, a system in human sentiments and
ideas : and this system has for its motive power certain
general traits, certain characteristics of the intellect and
the heart common to men of one race, age, or country.
As in mineralogy the crystals, however diverse, spring
from certain simple physical forms, so in history, civilis-
ations, however diverse, are derived from certain simple
spiritual forms. The one are explained by a primitive
geometrical element, as the others are by a primitive
psychological element. In order to master the classifi-
cation of mineralogical systems, we must first consider
a regular and general solid, its sides and angles, and
observe in this the numberless transformations of which
it is capable. So, if you would realise the system of
historical varieties, consider first a human soul generally,
with its two or three fundamental faculties, and in this
compendium you will perceive the principal forms which
it can present. After all, this kind of ideal picture,
geometrical as well as psychological, is not very complex,
and we speedily see the limits of the outline in which
civilisations, like crystals, are constrained to exist.

What is really the mental structure of man ? Images
or representations of things, which float within him,
exist for a time, are effaced, and return again, after he
has been looking upon a tree, an animal, any visible
object. This is the subject-matter, the development
whereof is double, either speculative or practical, accord-
ing as the representations resolve themselves into a
general conception or an active resolution. Here we have
the whole of man in an abridgment ; and in this limited
circle human diversities meet, sometimes in the womb
of the primordial matter, sometimes in the twofold

U INTRODUCTION.

primordial development. However minute in their
elements, they are enormous in the aggregate, and
the least alteration in the factors produces vast altera-
tion in the results. According as the representa-
tion is clear and as it were punched out or confused
and faintly denned, according as it embraces a great
or small number of the characteristics of the object,
according as it is violent and accompanied by impulses,
or quiet and surrounded by calm, all the operations
and processes of the human machine are transformed.
So, again, according as the ulterior development of the
representation varies, the whole human development
varies. If the general conception in which it results
is a mere dry notation (in Chinese fashion), language
becomes a sort of algebra, religion and poetry dwindle,
philosophy is reduced to a kind of moral and practical
common sense, science to 'a collection of utilitarian
formulas, classifications, mnemonics, and the whole in-
tellect takes a positive bent. If, on the contrary, the
general representation in which the conception results
is a poetical and figurative creation, a living symbol, as
among the Aryan races, language becomes a sort of deli-
cately-shaded and coloured epic poem, in which every
word is a person, poetry and religion assume a magnifi-
cent and inexhaustible grandeur, metaphysics are widely
and subtly developed, without regard to positive appli-
cations ; the whole intellect, in spite of the inevitable
deviations and shortcomings of its effort, is smitten
with the beautiful and the sublime, and conceives an
ideal capable by its nobleness and its harmony of
rallying round it the tenderness and enthusiasm of the
human race. If, again, the general conception in which
the representation results is poetical but not graduated ;

INTRODUCTION. 15

if man arrives at it not by an uninterrupted gradation,
but by a quick intuition ; if the original operation is
not a regular development, but a violent explosion, —
then, as with the Semitic races, metaphysics are absent,
religion conceives God only as a king solitary and de-
vouring, science cannot grow, the intellect is too rigid
and unbending to reproduce the delicate operations of
nature, poetry can give birth only to vehement and
grandiose exclamations, language cannot unfold the web
of argument and of eloquence, man is reduced to a lyric
enthusiasm, an unchecked passion, a fanatical and limited
action. In this interval between the particular repre-
sentation and the universal conception are found the
germs of the greatest human differences. Some races,
as the classical, pass from the first to the second by a
graduated scale of ideas, regularly arranged, and general
by degrees ; others, as the Germanic, traverse the same
ground by leaps, without uniformity, after vague and
prolonged groping. Some, like the Eomans and English,
halt at the first steps ; others, like the Hindoos and
Germans, mount to the last. If, again, after consider-
ing the passage from the representation to the idea, we
consider that from the representation to the resolution,
we find elementary differences of the like importance
and the like order, according as the impression is sharp,
as in southern climates, or dull, as in northern ; accord-
ing as it results in instant action, as among barbarians,
or slowly, as in civilised nation^ ; as it is capable or not
of growth, inequality, persistence, and relations. The
whole network of human passions, the chances of peace
and public security, the sources of labour and action,
spring from hence. Such is the case with all primordial
differences : their issues embrace an entire civilisation :

16 INTRODUCTION.

and we may compare them to those algebraical formulas
which, in a narrow limit, contain in advance the whole
curve of which they form the law. Not that this law
is always developed to its issue; there are perturbing
forces ; but when it is so, it is not that the law was false,
but that it was not single. New elements become
mingled with the old ; great forces from without counter-
act the primitive. The race emigrates, like the Aryan,
and the change of climate has altered in its case the
whole economy, intelligence, and organisation of society.
The people has been conquered, like the Saxon nation,
and a new political structure has imposed on it customs,
capacities, and inclinations which it had not. The
nation has installed itself in the midst of a conquered
people, downtrodden and threatening, like the ancient
Spartans ; and the necessity of living like troops in
the field has violently distorted in an unique direction
the whole moral and social constitution. In each case,
the mechanism of human history is the same. We
continually find, as the original mainspring, some very
general disposition of mind and soul, innate and ap-
pended by nature to the race, or acquired and produced
by some circumstance acting upon the race. These
mainsprings, once admitted, produce their effect gradu-
ally : I mean that after some centuries they bring the
nation into a new condition, religious, literary, social,
economic ; a new condition which, combined with their
renewed effort, produces another condition, sometimes
good, sometimes bad, sometimes slowly, sometimes
quickly, and so forth ; so that we may regard the whole
progress of each distinct civilisation as the effect of a
permanent force which, at every stage, varies its opera-
tion by modifying the circumstances of its action.

INTRODUCTION. 17

V.

Three different sources contribute to produce this
elementary moral state — RACE, SURROUNDINGS, and
EPOCH. What we call the race are the innate and here-
ditary dispositions which man brings with him into the
world, and which, as a rule, are united with the marked
differences in the temperament and structure of the body.
They vary with various peoples. There is a natural
variety of men, as of oxen and horses, some brave and
intelligent, some timid and dependent, some capable of
superior conceptions and creations, some reduced to rudi-
mentary ideas and inventions, -some more specially fitted
to special works, and gifted more richly with particular
instincts, as we meet with species of dogs better favoured
than others, — these for coursing, those for fighting, those
for hunting, these again for house dogs or shepherds'
dogs. We have here a distinct force, — so distinct, that
amidst the vast deviations which the other two motive
forces produce in him, one can recognise it still ; and a
race, like the old Aryans, scattered from the Ganges
as far as the Hebrides, settled in every clime, and
every stage of civilisation, transformed by thirty cen-
turies of revolutions, nevertheless manifests in its
languages, religions, literatures, philosophies, the com-
munity of blood and of intellect which to this day binds
its offshoots together. Different as they are, their
parentage is not obliterated ; barbarism, culture and
grafting, differences of sky and soil, fortunes good and
bad, have laboured in vain : the great marks of the
original model have remained, and we find again the two
or three principal lineaments of the primitive stamp
underneath the secondary imprints which time has laid
upon them. There is nothing astonishing in this extra-

VOL. i. c

18 INTRODUCTION.

ordinary tenacity. Although the vastness of the distance
Lets us but half perceive — and by a doubtful light — the
origin of species,1 the events of history sufficiently
illumine the events anterior to history, to explain the
almost immovable steadfastness of the primordial marks.
When we meet with them, fifteen, twenty, thirty cen-
turies before our era, in an Aryan, an Egyptian, a Chinese,
they represent the work of a great many ages, perhaps
of several myriads of centuries. For as soon as an
animal begins to exist, it has to reconcile itself with its
surroundings ; it breathes and renews itself, is differ-
ently affected according to the variations in air, food,
temperature. Different climate and situation bring it
various needs, and consequently a different course of
activity ; and this, again, a different set of habits ; and
still again, a different set of aptitudes and instincts.
Man, forced to accommodate himself to circumstances,
contracts a temperament and a character corresponding
tt) them ; and his character, like his temperament, is
so much more stable, as the external impression is made
upon him by more numerous repetitions, and is trans-
mitted to his progeny by a more ancient descent. So
that at any moment we may consider the character of
a people as an abridgment of all its preceding actions
and sensations ; that is, as a quantity and as a weight,
not infinite,2 since everything in nature is finite, but
disproportioned to the rest, and almost impossible to
lift, since every moment of an almost infinite past has
contributed to increase it, and because, in order to raise
the scale, one must place in the opposite scale a still
greater number of actions and sensations. Such is the

1 Darwin, The Origin of Species. Prosper Lucas, de VHereditt.
2 Spinoza, Ethics. Part iv. axiom.

INTRODUCTION. 19

first and richest source of these master-faculties from
which historical events take their rise ; and one sees
at the outset, that if it be powerful, it is because this
is no simple spring, but a kind of lake, a deep reservoir
wherein other springs have, for a multitude of centuries,
discharged their several streams.

Having thus outlined the interior structure of a race,
we must consider the surroundings in which it exists.
For man is not alone in the world ; nature surrounds
him, and his fellow-men surround him; accidental
and secondary tendencies overlay his primitive ten-
dencies, and physical or social circumstances disturb
or confirm the character committed to their charge.
Sometimes the climate has had its effect. Though we
can follow but obscurely the Aryan peoples from their
common fatherland to their final settlements, we can yet
assert that the profound differences which are manifest
between the German races on the one side, and the
Greek and Latin on the other, arise for the most part
from the difference between the countries in which they
are settled : some in cold moist lands, deep in rugged
marshy forests or on the shores of a wild ocean, beset
by melancholy or violent sensations, prone to drunken-
ness and gluttony, bent on a fighting, blood-spilling
life ; others, again, within the loveliest landscapes, on a
bright and pleasant sea-coast, enticed to navigation and
commerce, exempt from gross cravings of the stomach,
inclined from the beginning to social ways, to a settled
organisation of the state, to feelings and dispositions
such as develop the art of oratory, the talent for enjoy-
ment, the inventions of science, letters, arts. Sometimes
the state policy has been at work, as in the two Italian
civilisations : the first wholly turned to action, conquest,

20 INTRODUCTION.

government, legislation, on account of the original site
of its city of refuge, its border-land emporium, its armed
aristocracy, who, by importing and drilling strangers and
conquered, created two hostile armies, having no escape
from its internal discords and its greedy instincts but
in systematic warfare ; the other, shut out from unity
and any great political ambition by the stability of its
municipal character, the cosmopolitan position of its
pope, and the military intervention of neighbouring
nations, directed by the whole bent of its magnificent
and harmonious genius towards the worship of pleasure
and beauty. Sometimes the social conditions have
impressed their mark, as eighteen centuries ago by
Christianity, and twenty-five centuries ago by Buddhism,
when around the Mediterranean, as well as in Hindostan,
the extreme results of Aryan conquest and civilisation
induced intolerable oppression, the subjugation of the
individual, utter despair, the thought that the world was
cursed, with the development of metaphysics and myth,
so that man in this dungeon of misery, feeling his heart
softened, begot the idea of abnegation, charity, tender
love, gentleness, humility, brotherly love — there, in a
notion of universal nothingness, here under the Father-
hood of God. Look around you upon the regulating in-
stincts and faculties implanted in a race — in short, the
mood of intelligence in which it thinks and acts at the
present time : you will discover most often the work of
some one of these prolonged situations, these surrounding
circumstances, persistent and gigantic pressures, brought
to bear upon an aggregate of men who, singly and to-
gether, from generation to generation, are continually
moulded and modelled by their action ; in Spain, a
crusade against the Mussulmans which lasted eight cen-

INTRODUCTION. 21

turies, protracted even beyond and until the exhaustion
of the nation by the expulsion of the Moors, the spoli-
ation of the Jews, the establishment of the Inquisition,
the Catholic wars ; in England, a political establishment
of eight centuries, which keeps a man erect and respect-
ful, in independence and obedience, and accustoms him
to strive unitedly, under the authority of the law ; in
France, a Latin organisation, which, imposed first upon
docile barbarians, then shattered in the universal crash,
was reformed from within under a lurking conspiracy of
the national instinct, was developed under hereditary
kings, ends in a sort of levelling republic, centralised,
administrative, under dynasties exposed to revolution.
These are the most efficacious of the visible causes which
mould the primitive man : they are to nations what
education, career, condition, abode, are to individuals ;
and they seem to comprehend everything, since they
comprehend all external powers which mould human
matter, and by which the external acts on the internal.

There is yet a third rank of causes ; for, with the
forces within and without, there is the work which they
have already produced together, and this work itself
contributes to produce that which follows. Beside the
pennanent impulse and the given surroundings, there is
the acquired momentum. When the national character
and surrounding circumstances operate, it is not upon
a tabula rasa, but on a ground on which marks are
already impressed. According as one takes the ground
at one moment or another, the imprint is different ;
and this is the cause that the total effect is different.
Consider, for instance, two epochs of a literature or
art, — French tragedy under Corneille and under Vol-

22 INTRODUCTION.

taire, the Greek drama under ^Escliylus and under
Euripides, Italian painting under da Vinci and under
Guido. Truly, at either of these two extreme points
the general idea has not changed ; it is always the
same human type which is its subject of representation
or painting ; the mould of verse, the structure of the
drama, the form of body has endured. But among
several differences there is this, that the one artist is
the precursor, the other the successor; the first has no
model, the second has; the first sees objects face to
face, the second sees them through the first ; that many
great branches of art are lost, many details are perfected,
that simplicity and grandeur of impression have di-
minished, pleasing and refined forms have increased, —
in short, that the first work has influenced the second.
Thus it is with a people as with a plant ; the same sap,
under the same temperature, and in the same soil, pro-
duces, at different steps of its progressive development,
different formations, buds, flowers, fruits, seed-vessels, in
such a manner that the one which follows must always
be preceded by the former, and must spring up from
its death. And if now you consider no longer a brief
epoch, as our own time, but one of those wide intervals
which embrace one or more centuries, like the middle
ages, or our last classic age, the conclusion will be
similar. A certain dominant idea has had sway ; men,
for two, for five hundred years, have taken to themselves
a certain ideal model of man : in the middle ages, the
knight and the monk ; in our classic age, the courtier,
the man who speaks well. This creative and universal
idea is displayed over the whole field of action and
thought ; and after covering the world with its involun-
tarily systematic works, it has faded, it has died away.

INTRODUCTION. 23

and lo, a new idea springs up, destined to a like
domination, and as manifold creations. And here
remember that the second depends in part upon the
first, and that the first, uniting its effect with those of
national genius and surrounding circumstances, imposes
on each new creation its bent and direction. The
great historical currents are formed after this law — the
long dominations of one intellectual pattern, or a
master idea, such as the period of spontaneous creations
called the Kenaissance, or the period of oratorical
models called the Classical Age, or the series of mystical
systems called the Alexandrian and Christian eras, or
the series of mythological efflorescences which we meet
with in the infancy of the German people, of the Indian
and the Greek. Here as elsewhere we have but a
mechanical problem ; the total effect is a result, depend-
ing entirely on the magnitude and direction of the
producing causes. The only difference which separates
these moral problems from physical ones is, that the
magnitude and direction cannot be valued or computed
in the first as in the second. If a need or a faculty is
a quantity, capable of degrees, like a pressure or a
weight, this quantity is not measurable like the pressure
or the weight. We cannot define it in an exact or
approximative formula ; we cannot have more, or give
more, in respect of it, than a literary impression ; we
are limited to marking and quoting the salient points
by which it is manifested, and which indicate approxi-
mately and roughly the part of the scale which is its
position. But though the means of notation are not
the same in the moral and physical sciences, yet as in
both the matter is the same, equally made up of forces,
magnitudes, and directions, we may say that in both

24 INTRODUCTION.

the final result is produced after the same method. It
is great or small, as the fundamental forces are great
or small and act more or less exactly in the same sense,
according as the distinct effects of race, circumstance,
and epoch combine to add the one to the other, or to
annul one another. Thus are explained the long
impotences and the brilliant triumphs which make their
appearance irregularly and without visible cause in the
life of a people ; they are caused by internal concords
or contrarieties. There was such a concord when in
the seventeenth century the sociable character and the
conversational aptitude, innate in France, encountered
the drawing-room manners and the epoch of oratorical
analysis ; when in the nineteenth century the profound
and pliant genius of Germany encountered the age of
philosophical systems and of cosmopolitan criticism.
There was such a contrariety when in the seventeenth
century the harsh and lonely English genius tried
blunderingly to adopt a new-born politeness ; when in
the sixteenth century the lucid and prosaic French
spirit tried vainly to bring forth a living poetry. That
hidden concord of creative forces produced the finished
urbanity and the noble and regular literature under
Louis XIV. and Bossuet, the grand metaphysics and
broad critical sympathy of Hegel and Goethe. That
hidden contrariety of creative forces produced the im-
perfect literature, the scandalous comedy, the abortive
drama under Dryden and Wycherley, the feeble Greek
importations, the groping elaborate efforts, the scant
half-graces under Eonsard and the Pleiad. So much
we can say with confidence, that the unknown creations
towards which the current of the centuries conducts us,
will be raised up and regulated altogether by the three

INTRODUCTION. 25

primordial forces ; that if these forces could be measured
and computed, we might deduce from them as from a
formula the characteristics of future civilisation; and
that if, in spite of the evident crudeness of our nota-
tions, and the fundamental inexactness of our measures,
we try now to form some idea of our general destiny,
it is upon an examination of these forces that we must
base our prophecy. Eor in enumerating them, we
traverse the complete circle of the agencies ; and when we
have considered RACE, SURROUNDINGS, and EPOCH, which
are the internal mainsprings, the external pressure, and
the acquired momentum, we have exhausted not only
the whole of the actual causes, but also the whole of
the possible causes of motion.

VI.

It remains for us to examine how these causes, when
applied to a nation or an age, produce their results.
As a spring, rising from a height and flowing downwards
spreads its streams, according to the depth of the descent,
stage after stage, until it reaches the lowest level of the
soil, so the disposition of intellect or soul impressed on
a people by race, circumstance, or epoch, spreads in
different proportions and by regular descents, down the
diverse orders of facts which make up its civilisation.1
If we arrange the map of a country, starting from the
watershed, we find that below this common point the
streams are divided into five or six principal basins,

1 For this scale of co-ordinate effects, consult Renau, Langues Stmi*
tiques, ch. i. ; Mommsen, Comparison between the Greek and Roman
Civilisations, ch. ii. vol. i. 3d ed. ; Tocqueville, Co'iistquenax de la
Democratic en Amtrique, vol. iii.

26 INTRODUCTION.

then each of these into several secondary basins, and so
on, until the whole country with its thousand details is
included in the ramifications of this network. So, if
we arrange the psychological map of the events and
sensations of a human civilisation, we find first of all
five or six well-defined provinces — religion, art, philo-
sophy, the state, the family, the industries ; then in each
of these provinces natural departments ; and in each of
these, smaller territories, until we arrive at the number-
less details of life such as may be observed within and
around us every day. If now we examine and compare
these diverse groups of facts, we find first of all that
they are made up of parts, and that all have parts in
common. Let us take first the three chief works of
human intelligence — religion, art, philosophy. What
is a philosophy but a conception of nature and its prim-
ordial causes, under the form of abstractions and formu-
las ? What is there at the bottom of a religion or of
an art but a conception of this same nature and of these
same causes under form of symbols more or less precise,
and personages more or less marked; with this difference,
that in the first we believe that they exist, in the second
we believe that they do not exist ? Let the reader con-
sider a few of the great creations of the intelligence in
India, Scandinavia, Persia, Eome, Greece, and he will
see that, throughout, art is a kind of philosophy made
sensible, religioD a poem taken for true, philosophy an
art and a religion dried up, and reduced to simple ideas.
There is therefore, at the core of each of these three
groups, a common element, the conception of the world
and its principles ; and if they differ among themselves,
it is because each combines with the common, a distinct
element : now the power of abstraction, again the power

INTRODUCTION. 27

to personify and to believe, and finally the power to
personify and not believe. Let us now take the two
chief works of human association, the family and the
state. What forms the state but a sentiment of obedi-
ence, by which the many unite under the authority of a
chief? And what forms the family but the sentiment
of obedience by which wife and children act under the
direction of a father and husband ? The family is a
natural state, primitive and restrained, as the state is
an artificial family, ulterior and expanded; and under-
neath the differences arising from the number, origin, and
condition of its members, we discover in the small society
as in the great, a like disposition of the fundamental
intelligence which assimilates and unites them. Now
suppose that this element receives from circumstance,
race, or epoch certain special marks, it is clear that all
the groups into which it enters will be modified propor-
tionately. If the sentiment of obedience is merely fear,'
you will find, as in most Oriental states, a brutal
despotism, exaggerated punishment, oppression of the
subject, servility of manners, insecurity of property,
impoverished production, the slavery of women, and the
customs of the harem. If the sentiment of obedience
has its root in the instinct of order, sociality, and honour,
you will find, as in France, a perfect military organ-
isation, a fine administrative hierarchy, a want of public
spirit with occasional jerks of patriotism, ready docility
of the subject with a revolutionary impatience, the
cringing courtier with the counter-efforts of the high-
bred man, the refined pleasure of conversation and
society on the one hand, and the worry at the fireside
and among the family on the other, the equality of

1 Montesquieu, Esprit dcs Lois, Prwcipes des trois aouvernements.

28 INTRODUCTION.

husband and wife, the imperfection of the married
state, and consequently the necessary constraint of the
law. If, again, the sentiment of obedience has its root
in the instinct of subordination and the idea of duty,
you will find, as among the Germans, security and hap-
piness in the household, a solid basis of domestic life, a
tardy and incomplete development of social and con-
versational life, an innate respect for established dig-
nities, a superstitious reverence for the past, the keep-
ing up of social inequalities, natural and habitual regard
for the law. So in a race, according as the aptitude for
general ideas varies, religion, art, and philosophy vary.
If man is naturally inclined to the widest universal con-
ceptions, and apt to disturb them at the same time by
the nervous delicacy of his over-sensitive organisation,
you will find, as in India, an astonishing abundance of
gigantic religious creations, a glowing outgrowth of vast
and transparent epic poems, a strange tangle of subtle
and imaginative philosophies, all so well interwoven,
and so penetrated with a common essence, as to be
instantly recognised, by their breadth, their colouring,
and their want of order, as the products of the same
climate and the same intelligence. If, on the other
hand, a man naturally staid and balanced in mind
limits of his own accord the scope of his ideas, in order
the better to define their form, you will find, as in
Greece, a theology of artists and tale-tellers ; distinc-
tive gods, soon considered • distinct from things, and
transformed, almost at the outset, into recognised per-
sonages; the sentiment of universal unity all but
effaced, and barely preserved in the vague notion of
Destiny ; a philosophy rather close and delicate than
grand and systematic, with shortcomings in higher

INTRODUCTION. 29

metaphysics,1 but incomparable for logic, sophistry,
and morals ; poetry and arts superior for clearness, art-
lessness, just proportions, truth, and beauty, to all that
have ever been known. If, ,once more, man, reduced
to narrow conceptions, and deprived of all speculative
refinement, is at the same time altogether absorbed and
straitened by practical occupations, you will find, as in
Rome, rudimentary deities, mere hollow names, serving
to designate the trivial details of agriculture, generation,
household concerns, customs about marriage, rural life,
producing a mythology, hence a philosophy, a poetry,
either worth nothing or borrowed. Here, as everywhere,
the law of mutual dependence2 comes into play. A civi-
lisation forms a body, and its parts are connected with
each other like the parts of an organic body. As in an
animal, instincts, teeth, limbs, osseous structure, mus-
cular envelope, are mutually connected, so that a change
in one produces a corresponding change in the rest, and
a clever naturalist can by a process of reasoning recon-
struct out of a few fragments almost the whole body ;
even so in a civilisation, religion, philosophy, the organ-
isation of the family, literature, the arts, make up a
system in which every local change induces a general
change, so that an experienced historian, studying some
particular part of it, sees in advance and half predicts
the character of the rest. There is nothing vague in
this interdependence. In the living body the regulator

1 The Alexandrian philosophy had its birth from the West. The
metaphysical notions of Aristotle are isolated ; moreover, with him as
with Plato, they are but a sketch. By way of contrast consider the
systematic vigour of Plotinus, Proclus, Schelling, and Hegel, or the
wonderful boldness of Brahminical and Buddhistic speculation.

• I have endeavoured on several occasions to give expression to this
law, notably in th« oreta^e to Essais de Gritique et d'Histoire.

30 INTRODUCTION.

is, first, its tendency to manifest a certain primary type ;
tii en its necessity for organs whereby to satisfy its wants
and to be in harmony with itself in order that it may
live. In a civilisation, the regulator is the presence, in
every great human creation, of a productive element,
present also in other surrounding creations, — to wit,
some faculty, aptitude, disposition, effective and discern-
ible, which, being possessed of its proper character,
introduces it into all the operations in which it assists,
and, according to its variations, causes all the* works in
which it co-operates to vary also.

VII.

At this point we can obtain a glimpse of the prin-
cipal features of human transformations, and begin to
search for the general laws which regulate, not events
only, but classes of events, not such and such religion
or literature, but a group of literatures or religions.
If, for instance, it were admitted that a religion is a
metaphysical poem, accompanied by belief ; and remark-
ing at the same time that there are certain epochs,
races, and circumstances in which belief, the poetical
and metaphysical faculty, show themselves with an
unwonted vigour ; if we consider that Christianity and
Buddhism were produced at periods of high philosophi-
cal conceptions, and amid such miseries as raised up
the fanatics of the Cevennes ; if we recognise, on the
other hand, that primitive religions are born at the
awakening of human reason, during the richest blossom-
ing of human imagination, at a time of the fairest
artlessness and the greatest credulity; if we consider,
also, that Mohammedanism appeared with the dawning
of poetic prose, and the conception of national unity,

INTKODUCTION. 31

amongst a people destitute of science, at a period of
sudden development of the intellect, — we might then
conclude that a religion is born, declines, is reformed
and transformed according as circumstances confirm and
combine with more or less exactitude and force its three
generative instincts ; and we should understand why
it is endemic in India, amidst imaginative, philosophic,
eminently fanatic brains; why it blossomed forth so
strangely and grandly in the middle ages, amidst an
oppressive organisation, new tongues and literatures ;
why it was aroused in the sixteenth century with a
new character and heroic enthusiasm, amid universal
regeneration, and during the awakening of the German
races ; why it breaks out into eccentric sects amid the
coarse American democracy, and under the bureaucratic
Eussian despotism ; why, in short, it is spread, at the
present day, over Europe in such different dimensions
and such various characteristics, according to the dif-
ferences of race and civilisation. And so for every
kind of human production — for literature, music, the
fine arts, philosophy, science, the state, industries, and
the rest. Each of these has for its direct cause a moral
disposition, or a combination of moral dispositions : the
cause given, they appear; the cause withdrawn, they
vanish : the weakness or intensity of the cause measures
their weakness or intensity. They are bound up with
their causes, as a physical phenomenon with its condition,
as the dew with the fall of the variable temperature,
as dilatation with heat. There are similarly connected
data in the moral as in the physical world, as rigorously
bound together, and as universally extended in the one
as in the other. Whatever in the one case produces,
alters, or suppresses the first term, produces, alters, or

32 INTRODUCTION.

suppresses the second as a necessary consequence.
Whatever lowers the surrounding temperature, deposits
the dew. Whatever develops credulity side by side with
a poetical conception of the world, engenders religion.
Thus phenomena have been produced ; thus they will
be produced. As soon as we know the sufficient and
necessary condition of one of these vast occurrences,
our understanding grasps the future as well as the past.
We can say with confidence in what circumstances it
will reappear, foretell without presumption many por-
tions of its future history, and sketch cautiously some
features of its ulterior development.

VIII.

History now attempts, or rather is very near attempt-
ing this method of research. The question propounded
now-a-days is of this kind. Given a literature, philo-
sophy, society, art, group of arts, what is the moral
condition which produced it ? what the conditions of
race, epoch, circumstance, the most fitted to produce
this moral condition ? There is a distinct moral con-
dition for each of these formations, and for each of
their branches ; one for art in general, one for each
kind of art — for architecture, painting, sculpture, music,
poetry ; each has its special germ in the wide field of
human psychology; each has its law, and it is by
virtue of this law that we see it raised, by chance, as it
seems, wholly alone, amid the miscarriage of its neigh-
bours, like painting in Flanders and Holland in the
seventeenth century, poetry in England in the sixteenth,
music in Germany in the eighteenth. At this moment,
and in these countries, the conditions have been ful-
filled for one art, not for others, and a single branch

INTRODUCTION. 33

has budded in the general barrenness. History must
search now-a-days for these rules of human growth ;
with the special psychology of each special formation it
must occupy itself; the finished picture of these
characteristic conditions it must now labour to compose.
No task is more delicate or more difficult ; Montesquieu
tried it, but in his time history was too new to admit
of his success; they had not yet even a suspicion of
the road necessary to be travelled, and hardly now do
we begin to catch sight of it. Just as in its elements
astronomy is a mechanical and physiology a chemical
problem, so history in its elements is a psychological
problem. There is a particular system of inner im-
pressions and operations which makes an artist, a
believer, a musician, a painter, a man in a nomadic or
social state; and of each the birth and growth, the
energy, the connection of ideas and emotions, are differ-
ent : each has his moral history and his special structure,
with some governing disposition and some dominant
feature. To explain each, it would be necessary to
write a chapter of psychological analysis, and barely
yet has such a method been rudely sketched. One
man alone, Stendhal, with a peculiar bent of mind and
a strange education, has undertaken it, and to this day
the majority of readers find his books paradoxical and
obscure : his talent and his ideas were premature ; his
admirable divinations were not understood, any more
than his profound sayings thrown out cursorily, or the
astonishing precision of his system and of his logic.
It was not perceived that, under the exterior of a con-
versationalist and a man of the world, he explained the
most complicated of esoteric mechanisms ; that he laid
his finger on the mainsprings ; that he introduced into
VOL. I. D

34 INTRODUCTION.

the history of the heart scientific processes, the art of
notation, decomposition, deduction ; that he first marked
the fundamental causes of nationality, climate, tempera-
ment ; in short, that he treated sentiments as they
should be treated, — in the manner of the naturalist,
and of the natural philosopher, who classifies and
weighs forces. For this very reason he was consi-
dered dry and eccentric : he remained solitary, writing
novels, voyages, notes, for which he sought and obtained
a score of readers. And yet we find in liis books at
the present day essays the most suitable to open the
path which I have endeavoured to describe. No one
has better taught us how to open our eyes and see, to
see first the men that surround us and the life that
is present, then the ancient and authentic docu-
ments, to read between the black and white lines of
the pages, to recognise beneath the old impression,
under the scribbling of a text, the precise sentiment,
the movement of ideas, the state of mind in which they
were written. In his writings, in Sainte-Beuve, in the
German critics, the reader will see all the wealth that
may be drawn from a literary work : when the work is
rich, and people know how to interpret it, we find
there the psychology of a soul, frequently of an age,
now and then of a race. In this light, a great poeni,
a fine novel, the confessions of a superior man, are
more instructive than a heap of historians with their
histories. I would give fifty volumes of charters and a
hundred volumes of state papers for the memoirs of
Cellini, the epistles of St. Paul, the Table-talk of
Luther, or the comedies of Aristophanes. In this con-
sists the importance of literary works : they are instruc-
tive because they are beautiful : their utility grows

INTRODUCTION. 36

with their perfection ; and if they furnish documents it
is because they are monuments. The more a book
brings sentiments into light, the more it is a work of
literature ; for the proper office of literature is to make
sentiments visible. The more a book represents im-
portant sentiments, the higher is its place in literature ;
for it is by representing the mode of being of a whole
nation and a whole age, that a writer rallies round him
the sympathies of an entire age and an entire nation.
This is why, amid the writings which set before our
eyes the sentiments of preceding generations, a litera-
ture, and notably a grand literature, is incomparably
the best. It resembles those admirable apparatus of
extraordinary sensibility, by which physicians disen-
tangle and measure the most recondite and delicate
changes of a body. Constitutions, religions, do not
approach it in importance ; the articles of a code of
laws and of a creed only show us the spirit roughly
and without delicacy. If there are any writings in
which politics and dogma are full of life, it is in the
eloquent discourses of the pulpit and the tribune,
memoirs, unrestrained confessions ; and all this be-
longs to literature : so that, in addition to itself, it has
all the advantage of other works. It is then chiefly
by the study of literatures that one may construct a
moral history, and advance toward the knowledge of
psychological laws, from which events spring.

I intend to write the history of a literature, and to
seek in it for the psychology of a people : if I have
chosen this nation in particular, it is not without a
reason. I had to find a people with a grand and com-
plete literature, and this is rare : there are few nations
who have, during their whole existence, really thought

86 INTKODUCTION.

and written. Among the ancients, the Latin literature
is worth, nothing at the outset, then it borrowed and be-
came imitative. Among the moderns, German literature
does not exist for nearly two centuries.1 Italian litera-
ture and Spanish literature end at the middle of the
seventeenth century. Only ancient Greece, modern
France and England, offer a complete series of great sig-
nificant monuments. I have chosen England, because
being still living, and subject to direct examination, it may
be better studied than a destroyed civilisation, of which
we retain but the relics, and because, being different
from France, it has in the eyes of a Frenchman a more
distinct character. Besides, there is a peculiarity in
this civilisation, that apart from its spontaneous develop-
ment, it presents a forced deviation, it has suffered the
last and most effectual of all conquests, and the three
grounds whence it has sprung, race, climate, the Norman
invasion, may be observed in its remains with perfect
exactness ; so that we may examine in this history the
two most powerful moving springs of human transforma-
tion, natural bent and constraining force, and we may
examine them without uncertainty or gap, in a series
of authentic and unmutilated memorials.

I have endeavoured to define these primary springs,
to exhibit their gradual effects, to explain how they
have ended by bringing to light great political, religious,
and literary works, and by developing the recondite
mechanism whereby the Saxon barbarian has beea
transformed into the Englishman of to-day.
1 From 1550 to 1750.

HISTOEY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE,

BOOK I.
THE SOUKCE.

CHAPTEE I.

&!je Saxons.

I.

As you coast the North Sea from the Scheldt to Jutland,
you will mark in the first place that the characteristic
feature is the want of slope ; marsh, waste, shoal ; the
rivers hardly drag themselves along, swollen and slug-
gish, with long, black-looking waves ; the flooding stream
oozes over the banks, and appears further on in stagnant
pools. In Holland the soil is but a sediment of mud ;
here and there only does the earth cover it with a crust,
shallow and brittle, the mere alluvium of the river, which
the river seems ever about to destroy. Thick clouds
hover above, being fed by ceaseless exhalations. They
lazily turn their violet flanks, grow black, suddenly
descend in heavy showers ; the vapour, like a furnace-
smoke, crawls for ever on the horizon. Thus watered,
plants multiply; in the angle between Jutland and
the continent, in a fat muddy soil, " the verdure is aa

38 THE SOURCE. BOOK t

fresh as that of England."1 Immense forests covered
the land even after the eleventh century. The sap of
this humid country, thick and potent, circulates in man
as in the plants ; man's respiration, nutrition, sensations
and habits affect also his faculties and his frame.

The land produced after this fashion has one enemy,
to wit, the sea. Holland maintains its existence only by
virtue of its dykes. In 1654 those in Jutland burst,
and fifteen thousand of the inhabitants were swallowed
up. One need only see the blast of the North swirl
down upon the low level of the soil, wan and ominous : 2
the vast yellow sea dashes against the narrow belt of
flat coast which seems incapable of a moment's resistance;
the wind howls and bellows; the sea-mews cry; the
poor little ships flee as fast as they can, bending almost
to the gunwale, and endeavour to find a refuge in the
mouth of the river, which seems as hostile as the sea.
A sad and precarious existence, as it were face to face
with a beast of prey. The Frisians, in their ancient
laws, speak already of the league they have made against
" the ferocious ocean." Even in a calm this sea is unsafe.
"Before me rolleth a waste of water . . . and above me
go rolling the storm-clouds, the formless dark grey
daughters of air, which from the sea, in cloudy buckets
scoop up the water, ever wearied lifting and lifting, and
then pour it again in the sea, a mournful, wearisome

1 Malte-Brun, iv. 398. Not counting bays, gulfs, and canals, the
sixteenth part of the country is covered by water. The dialect of Jut-
land bears still a great resemblance to English.

2 See Ruysdaal's painting in Mr. Baring's collection. Of the three
Saxon islands, North Strandt, Busen, and Heligoland, North Strandt
was inundated by the sea in 1300, 1483, 1532, 1615, and almost destroyed
in 1634. Busen is a level plain, beaten by storms, which it has been
found necessary to surround by a dyke. Heligoland was laid waste by
the sea in 800, 1300, 1500, 1649, the last time so violently that only a
portion of it remained. — Turner. Hist, of Angl. Saxons, 1852, i. 97.

CHAP. i. THE SAXONS. 39

business. Over the sea, flat on his face, lies the mon-
strous, terrible North wind, sighing and sinking his
voice as in secret, like an old grumbler, for once in
good humour, unto the ocean he talks, and he tells her
wonderful stories." 1 Eain, wind, and surge leave room
for naught but gloomy and melancholy thoughts. The
very joy of the billows has in it an inexplicable restless-
ness and harshness. From Holland to Jutland, a string of
small, deluged islands2 bears witness to their ravages ;
the shifting sands which the tide drifts up obstruct and
impede the banks and entrance of the rivers.3 The
first Eoman fleet, a thousand sail, perished there;
to this day ships wait a month or more in sight of
port, tossed upon the great white waves, not daring to
risk themselves in the shifting, winding channel, notori-
ous for its wrecks. In winter a breastplate of ice
covers the two streams ; the sea drives back the frozen
masses as they descend ; they pile themselves with a
crash upon the sandbanks, and sway to and fro ; now
and then you may see a vessel, seized as in a vice,
split in two beneath their violence. Picture, in this
foggy clime, amid hoar-frost and storm, in these
marshes and forests, half-naked savages, a kind of wild
beasts, fishers and hunters, but especially hunters of
men; these are they, Saxons, Angles, Jutes, Frisians;4
later on, Danes, who during the fifth and the ninth
centuries, with their swords and battle-axes, took and
kept the island of Britain.

1 Heine, The North Sea, translated by Charles G. LelancL Sec Tacitus,
Ann. "book 2, for the impressions of the Romans, "truculentiaeoeli."

2 Watten, Platen, Sande, Diineninselu.

8 Nine or ten miles out, near Heligoland, are the nearest soundings
of about fifty fathoms.

* Palgrave, Saxon Commonwealth,, vol. i

40 THE SOURCE. BOOK i.

A rude and foggy land, like their own, except in the
depth of its sea and the safety of its coasts, which one
day will call up real fleets and mighty vessels ; green
England — the word rises to the lips and expresses all
Here also moisture pervades everything ; even in sum-
mer the mist rises ; even on clear days you perceive it
fresh from the great sea-girdle, or rising from vast but
ever slushy meadows, undulating with hill and dale,
intersected with hedges to the limit of the horizon.
Here and there a sunbeam strikes on the higher grasses
with burning flash, and the splendour of the verdure
dazzles and almost blinds you. The overflowing water
straightens the flabby stems ; they grow up, rank, weak,
and filled with sap ; a sap ever renewed, for the gray
mists creep under a stratum of motionless vapour, and
at distant intervals the rim of heaven is drenched by
heavy showers. " There are yet commons as at the time
of the Conquest, deserted, abandoned,1 wild, covered with
furze and thorny plants, with here and there a horse
grazing in solitude. Joyless scene, unproductive soil!2
What a labour it has been to humanise it ! What
impression it must have made on the men of the South,
the Romans of Caesar ! I thought, when I saw it, of
the ancient Saxons, wanderers from West and North,
who came to settle in this land of marsh and fogs, on
the border of primeval forests, on the banks of these
great muddy streams, which roll down their slime to
meet the waves.3 They must have lived as hunters
and swineherds; growing, as before, brawny, fierce, gloomy.

1 Notes of a Journey in England.

2 Leonce de Lavergne, De V Agriculture anglaise. "The soil is
much worse than that of France. "

8 There are at least four rivers in England passing by the name trf
'* Ouae," which is only another form of "ooze." — TK.

CHAP. i. THE SAXONS. 41

Take civilisation from this soil, and there will remain
to the inhabitants only war, the chase, gluttony, drunk-
enness. Smiling love, sweet poetic dreams, art, refined
and nimble thought, are for the happy shdres of the
Mediterranean. Here the barbarian, ill housed in his
mud-hovel, who hears the rain pattering whole days
among the oak leaves — what dreams can he have, gazing
upon his mud-pools and his sombre sky ? "

II.

Huge white bodies, cool-blooded, with fierce blue
eyes, reddish flaxen hair ; ravenous stomachs, filled with
meat and cheese, heated by strong drinks ; of a cold
temperament, slow to love,1 home-stayers, prone to
brutal drunkenness : these are to this day the features
which descent and climate preserve in the race, and
these are what the Eoman historians discovered in their
former country. There is no living, in these lands,
without abundance of solid food; bad weather keeps
people at home ; strong drinks are necessary to cheer
them ; the senses become blunted, *the muscles are
braced, the will vigorous. In every country the body
of man is rooted deep into the soil of nature ; and in
this instance still deeper, because, being uncultivated,
he is less removed from nature. In Germany, storm-
beaten, in wretched boats of hide, amid the hardships
and dangers of seafaring life, they were pre-eminently
adapted for endurance and enterprise, inured to mis-
fortune, scorn ers of danger. Pirates at first: of all

1 Tacitus, De m&ribus Germanorum, passim ; Diem noctemque con-
tinuare potando, nulli probram. — Sera juvenum Venus. — Totos dies
jurta focum atque ignem agunt. Dargaud, Voyage en Danemark.
" They take six meals per day, the first at five o'clock in the morning
One should see the faces and meals at Hamburg and at Amsterdam."

42 THE SOURCE. BOOK i.

kinds of hunting the man-hunt is most profitable and
most noble ; they left the care of the land and flocks
to the women and slaves; seafaring, war, and pillage1
was their whole idea of a freeman's work. They dashed
to sea in their two-sailed barks, landed anywhere, killed
everything; and having sacrificed in honour of their
gods the tithe of their prisoners, and leaving behind
them the red light of their burnings, went farther on
to begin again. " Lord/' says a certain litany, " deliver
us from the fury of the Jutes." "Of all barbarians2
these are strongest of body and heart, the most formid-
able,"— we may add, the most cruelly ferocious. When
murder becomes a trade, it becomes a pleasure. About
the eighth century, the final decay of the great Eoman
corpse which Charlemagne had tried to revive, and
which was settling down into corruption, called them
like vultures to the prey. Those who had remained
in Denmark, with their brothers of Norway, fanatical
pagans, incensed against the Christians, made a descent
on all the surrounding coasts. Their sea-kings,3 "who
had never slept under the smoky rafters of a roof, who
had never drained the ale-horn by an inhabited hearth,"
laughed at wind and storms, and sang : " The blast of
the tempest aids our oars ; the bellowing of heaven,
the howling of the thunder, hurt us not ; the hurricane
is our servant, and drives us whither we wish to go."
" We hewed with our swords," says a song attributed
to Eagnar Lodbrog ; " was it not like that hour when
my bright bride I seated by me on the couch ? " One of

1 Bede, v. 10. Sidonius, viii. 6. Lingard, Hist, of England, 1854,
L chap. 2.

3 Zozimos, iii. 147. Amm. Marcellinus, xxviii. 52(5.

8 Aug. Thierry, Hist. S. Edrtiundi, vi. 441. See Ynglingasaga, and
especially Egil's Saga,

CHAP, i THE SAXONS. 43

them, at the monastery of Peterborough, kills with his
own hand all the monks, to the number of eighty-four ;
others, having taken King ^Ella, divided his ribs from
the spine, drew his lungs out, and threw salt into his
wounds. Harold Harefoot, having seized his rival
Alfred, with six hundred men, had them maimed,
blinded, hamstrung, scalped, or embowelled.1 Torture
and carnage, greed of danger, fury of destruction, obsti-
nate and frenzied bravery of an over-strong tempera-
ment, the unchaining of the butcherly instincts, — such
traits meet us at every step in the old Sagas. The
daughter of the Danish Jarl, seeing Egil taking his
seat near her, repels him with scorn, reproaching him
with " seldom having provided the wolves with hot
meat, with never having seen for the whole autumn a
raven croaking over the carnage." But Egil seized her
and pacified her by singing : " I have marched with
my bloody sword, and the raven has followed me.
Furiously we fought, the fire passed over the dwellings
of men ; we have sent to sleep in blood those who kept
the gates." From such table-talk, and such maidenly
tastes, we may judge of the rest.2

Behold them now in England, more settled and
wealthier : do you expect to find them much changed ?
Changed it may be, but for the worse, like the Franks,

1 Lingard, Hist, of England, i. 164, says, however, "Every tenth
man out of the six hundred received his liberty, and of the rest a few
were selected for slavery." — TB.

2 Franks, Frisians, Saxons, Danes, Norwegians, Icelanders, are one
and the same people. Their language, laws, religion, poetry, differ but
little. The more northern continue longest in their primitive manners.
Germany in the fourth and fifth centuries, Denmark and Norway in
the seventh and eighth, Iceland in the tenth and eleventh centuries^
present the same condition, and the muniments of each country will
fill up the gaps that exist in the history of the others.

44 THE SOURCE. BOOK i

like all barbarians who pass from action to enjoyment
They are more gluttonous, carving their hogs, filling them-
selves with flesh, swallowing down deep draughts of
mead, ale, spiced wines, all the strong, coarse drinks
which they can procure, and so they are cheered and
stimulated Add to this the pleasure of the fight. Not
easily with such instincts can they attain to culture ; to
find a natural and ready culture, we must look amongst
the sober and sprightly populations of the south. Here
the sluggish and heavy1 temperament remains long
buried in a brutal life ; people of the Latin race never
at a first glance see in them aught but large gross beasts,
clumsy and ridiculous when not dangerous and enraged.
Up to the sixteenth century, says an old historian, the
great body of the nation were little else than herdsmen,
keepers of cattle and sheep; up to the end of the
eighteenth drunkenness was the recreation of the higher
ranks ; it is still that of the lower ; and all the refine-
ment and softening influence of civilisation have not
abolished amongst them the use of the rod and the fist.
If the carnivorous, warlike, drinking savage, proof against
the climate, still shows beneath the conventions of our
modern society and the softness of our modern polish,
imagine what he must have been when, landing with
his band upon a wasted or desert country, and becoming
for the first time a settler, he saw extending to the horizon
the common pastures of the border country, and the great
primitive forests which furnished stags for the chase and
acorns for his pigs. The ancient histories tell us that
they had a great and a coarse appetite.2 Even at the
time of the Conquest the custom of drinking to excess

1 Tacitus, De mor. Germ. xxii. : Gens nee astuta nee callida.
* W. of Malmesbury. Henry of Huntingdon, vL 365.

CHAP, t THE SAXONS. 45

was a common vice with men of the highest ^ank, and
they passed in this way whole days and nights without
intermission. Henry of Huntingdon, in the twelfth
century, lamenting the ancient hospitality, says that the
Norman kings provided their courtiers with only one
meal a day, while the Saxon kings used to provide four,
One day, when Athelstan went with his nobles to visit
his relative Ethelfleda, the provision of mead was ex-
hausted at the first salutation, owing to the copiousness
of the draughts ; but Dunstan, forecasting the extent of
the royal appetite, had furnished the house, so that the
cup-bearers, as is the custom at royal feasts, were able
the whole day to serve it out in horns and other vessels,
and the liquor was not foun'd to be deficient. When
the guests were satisfied, the harp passed from hand to
hand, and the rude harmony of their deep voices swelled
under the vaulted roof. The monasteries themselves in
Edgard's time kept up games, songs, and dances till mid-
night. To shout, to drink, to gesticulate, to feel their
veins heated and swollen with wine, to hear and see
around them the riotous orgies, this was the first need of
the Barbarians.1 The heavy human brute gluts himself
with sensations and with noise.

For such appetites there was a stronger food, — I mean
blows and battle. In vain they attached themselves to
the soil, became tillers of the ground, in distinct com-
munities and distinct regions, shut up2 in their march

1 Tacitus, De moribus Germanorum, xxii. xxiii.

3 Kemble, Saxons in England, 1849, i. 70, ii. 184. " The Acts of
an Anglo-Saxon parliament are a series of treaties of peace between all
the associations which make up the State ; a continual revision and
renewal of the alliances offensiv-j and defensive of all the free men.
They are universally mutual contracts for the maintenance of the frid
or peace."

46 THE SOURCE. BOOK i

with their kindred and comrades, bound together, sepa-
rated from the mass, enclosed by sacred landmarks, by
primeval oaks on which they cut the figures of birds and
beasts, by poles set up in the midst of the marsh, which
whosoever removed was punished with cruel tortures.
In vain these Marches and Ga's1 were grouped into states
and finally formed a half-regulated society, with assem-
blies and laws, under the lead of a single king ; its very
structure indicates the necessities to supply which it
was created. They united in order to maintain peace ;
treaties of peace occupy their Parliaments ; provisions
for peace are the matter of their laws. War was waged
daily and everywhere ; the aim of life was, not to be slain,
ransomed, mutilated, pillaged, hung and of course, if it
was a woman, violated.2 Every man was obliged to appear
armed, and to be ready, with his burgh or his township,
to repel marauders, who went about in bands.3 The animal
was yet too powerful, too impetuous, too untamed. Anger
and covetousness in the first place brought him upon
his prey. Their history, I mean that of the Heptarchy,
is like a history of " kites and crows."4 They slew the
Britons or reduced them to slavery, fought the remnant
of the Welsh, Irish, and Picts, massacred one another,
were hewn down and cut to pieces by the Danes. In
a hundred years, out of fourteen kings of Northumbria,

1 A large district ; the word is still existing in German, as Rheingau,
Breisgau. — TR.

2 Turner, Hist, of the Anglo-Sax, ii. 440, Laws of Ina.

3 Such a band consisted of thirty-five men or more.

4 Milton's expression. Lingard's Histoi-y, i. chap. 3. This history
beat's much resemblance to that of the Franks in Gaul. See Gregory
of Tours. The Saxons, like the Franks, somewhat softened, but
rather degenerated, were pillaged and massacred by those of theiz
northern brothers who still remained in a savage state.

CHAP. i. THE SAXONS. 47

seven were slain and six deposed. Penda of Mercia
killed five kings, and in order to take the town of Barn-
borough, demolished all the neighbouring villages, heaped
their ruins into an immense pile, sufficient to burn all
the inhabitants, undertook to exterminate the Northum-
brians, and perished himself by the sword at the age of
eighty. Many amongst them were put to death by the
thanes ; one thane was burned alive ; brothers slew one
another treacherously. With us civilisation has inter-
posed, between the desire and its fulfilment, the counter-
acting and softening preventive of reflection and calcu-
lation ; here, the impulse is sudden, and murder and
every kind of excess spring from it instantaneously.
King Edwy1 having married Elgiva, his relation within
the prohibited degrees, quitted the hall where he was
drinking on the very day of his coronation, to be with
her. The nobles thought themselves insulted, and
immediately Abbot Dunstan went himself to seek the
young man. " He found the adulteress," says the monk
Osbern, " her mother, and the king together on the bed
of debauch. He dragged the king thence violently, and
setting the crown upon his head, brought him back to
the nobles." Afterwards Elgiva sent men to put out
Dunstan's eyes, and then, in a revolt, saved herself and
the king by hiding in the country ; but the men of the
North having seized her, "hamstrung her, and then sub-
jected her to the death which she deserved." 2 Barbarity
follows barbarity. At Bristol, at the time of the Con-
quest, as we are told by an historian of the time,3 it was

1 Vita S. Dunstaui, Anglia Sacra, ii.

2 It is amusing to compare the story of Edwy and Elgiva in Turner,
ii. 216, etc., and then in Lingard, i. 132, etc. The first accuses Dunstan,
the other defends him. — TR.

9 Life of Bishop Wolstcm.

48 THE SOURCE. BOOK i.

the custom to buy men and women in all parts of Eng-
land, and to carry them to Ireland for sale in order to
make money. The buyers usually made the young
women pregnant, and took them to market in that con-
dition, in order to ensure a better price. "You might
have seen with sorrow long files of young people of both
sexes and of the greatest beauty, bound with ropes, and
daily exposed for sale. . . . They sold in this manner
as slaves their nearest relatives, and even their own
children." And the chronicler adds that, having
abandoned this practice, they " thus set an example to
all the rest of England." Would you know the manners
of the highest ranks, in the family of the last king?1
At a feast in the king's hall, Harold was serving Edward
the Confessor with wine, when Tostig, his brother,
moved by envy, seized him by the hair. They were
separated. Tostig went to Hereford, where Harold
had ordered a royal banquet to be prepared. There
he seized his brother's attendants, and cutting off their
heads and limbs, he placed them in the vessels of
wine, ale, mead, and cider, and sent a message to the
king: "If you go to your farm, you will find there
plenty of salt meat, but you will do well to carry some
more with you." Harold's other brother, Sweyn, had
violated the abbess Elgiva, assassinated Beorn the thane,
and being banished from the country, had turned pirate.
When we regard their deeds of violence, their ferocity,
their cannibal jests, we see that they were not far removed
from the sea-kings, or from the followers of Odin, who

1 Tantae saevitiie erant fratres illi quod, cum alicujus nitidam villam
conspicerent, dominatorem de nocte interfici juberent, totamque pro-
geniem illius possessionemque defuncti obtinerent. Turner, iii. '17,
Henrv of Huntingdon, vi 8 £7

CHAP. i. THE SAXONS. 49

ate raw flesh, hung men as victims on the sacred trees of
Upsala, and killed themselves to make sure of dying as
they had lived, in blood. A score of times the old
ferocious instinct reappears beneath the thin crust of
Christianity. In the eleventh century, Siward,1 the
great Earl of Northumberland, was afflicted with a
dysentery ; and feeling his death near, exclaimed, "What
a shame for me not to have been permitted to die in so
many battles, and to end thus by a cow's death ! At
least put on my breastplate, gird on my sword, set my
helmet on my head, my shield in my left hand, my
battle-axe in my right, so that a stout warrior, like
myself, may die as a warrior." They did as he bade,
and thus died he honourably in his armour. They had
made one step, and only one, from barbarism.

III.

Under this native barbarism there were noble disposi-
tions, unknown to the Roman world, which were destined
to produce a better people out of its ruins. In the
first place, "a certain earnestness, which leads them out
of frivolous sentiments to noble ones."2 From their
origin in Germany this is what we find them, severe in
manners, with grave inclinations and a manly dignity.
They live solitary, each one near the spring or the wood
which has taken his fancy.3 Even in villages the cot-
tages were detached ; they must have independence and
free air. They had no taste for voluptuousness ; love was
tardy, education severe, their food simple; all the re-

1 " Pene gigas statura," says the chronicler. H. of Huntingdon, Ti
367. Kemble, i. 393. Turner, ii. 318.

2 Grimm, Mythology, 53, Preface.

8 Tacitus, xx. xxiii. xi. xii. xiii. et passim. We may still see the
traces of this taste in English dwellings.

VOL. I. E

50 THE SOURCE. BOOK L

creation they indulged in was the hunting of the aurochs,
and a dance amongst naked swords. Violent intoxica-
tion and perilous wagers were their weakest points;
they sought in preference not mild pleasured, but strong
excitement. In everything, even in their rude and mas-
culine instincts, they were men. Each in his own home,
on his land and in his hut, was his own master,
upright and free, in no wise restrained or shackled.
If the commonweal received anything from him, it was
because he gave it. He gave his vote in arms in all
great conferences, passed judgment in the assembly,
made alliances and wars on his own account, moved
from place to place, showed activity and daring.1 The
modern Englishman existed entire in this Saxon. If he
bends, it is because he is quite willing to bend ; he is no
less capable of self-denial than of independence; self-sacri-
fice is not uncommon, a man cares not for his blood or
his life. In Homer the warrior often gives way, and is
not blamed if he flees. In the Sagas, in the Edda, he
must be over-brave ; in Germany the coward is drowned
in the mud, under a hurdle. Through all outbreaks
of primitive brutality gleams obscurely the grand idea
of duty, which is, the self-constraint exercised in view
of some noble end. Marriage was pure amongst them,
chastity instinctive. Amongst the Saxons the adulterer
was punished by death ; the adulteress was obliged to
hang herself, or was stabbed by the knives of her corn-
.panions. The wives of the Cimbrians, when they could
not obtain from Marius assurance of their chastity, slew
themselves with their own hands. They thought there
was something sacred in a woman ; they married but
one, and kept faith with her. In fifteen centuries the idea

1 Tacitus, xiii.

CHAP. i. THE SAXONS. 51

of marriage is unchanged amongst them. The wife, on
entering her husband's home, is aware that she gives
herself altogether,1 "that she will have but one body, one
life with him ; that she will have no thought, no desire
beyond : that she will be the companion of his perils and
labours ; that she will suffer and dare as much as he, both
in peace and war." And he, like her, knows that he gives
himself. Having chosen his chief, he forgets himself in
him, assigns to him his own glory, serves him to the death.
" He is infamous as long as he lives, who returns from
the field of battle without his chief."2 It was on this
voluntary subordination that feudal society was based.
Man in this race, can accept a superior, can be capable
of devotion and respect. Thrown back upon himself
by the gloom and severity of his climate, he has dis-
covered moral beauty, while others discover sensuous
beauty. This land of naked brute, who lies all day by
his fireside, sluggish and dirty, always eating and drink-
ing,3 whose rusty faculties cannot follow the clear and
fine outlines of happily created poetic forms, catches a
glimpse of the sublime in his troubled dreams. He does
not see it, but simply feels it ; his religion is already
within, as it will be in the sixteenth century, when he
will cast off the sensuous worship imported from Eome,
and hallow the faith of the heart.4 His gods are not
enclosed in walls ; he has no idols. What he designates
by divine names, is something invisible and grand,
wliich floats through nature, and is conceived beyond

1 Tacitus, xix. viii. xvi. Kemble, i. 232. .

2 Tacitus, xiv.

3 " In oinni douio, nudi et sordidi. . . . Plus per otium

dediti somno, ciboque ; totos dies juxta focum atquti iguem aguiit"
* Grimm. 53, Preface. Tacitus, x.

52 THE SOURCE. BOOK i

nature,1 a mysterious infinity which the sense cannot
touch, but which " reverence alone can feel ;" and when,
later on, the legends define and alter this vague divina-
tion of natural powers, one idea remains at the bottom
of this chaos of giant-dreams, namely, that the world is
a warfare, and heroism the highest good.

In the beginning, say the old Icelandic legends,2 there
were two worlds, Niflheini the frozen, and Muspell the
burning. Prom the falling snow-flakes was born the
giant Ymir. " There was in times of old, where Ymir
dwelt, nor sand nor sea, nor gelid waves ; earth existed
not, nor heaven above ; 'twas a chaotic chasm, and grass
nowhere." There was but Ymir, the horrible frozen
Ocean, with his children, sprung from his feet and his
armpits ; then their shapeless progeny, Terrors of the
abyss, barren Mountains, Whirlwinds of the North, and
other malevolent beings, enemies of the sun and of life ;
then the cow Andhumbla, born also of melting snow,
brings to light, whilst licking the hoar-frost from the
rocks, a man Bur, whose grandsons kill the giant Ymir.
"From his flesh the earth was formed, and from his
bones the hills, the heaven from the skull of that ice-
cold giant, and from his blood the sea; but of his
brains the heavy clouds are all created." Then arose
war between the monsters of winter and the luminous
fertile gods, Odin the founder, Baldur the mild and

1 " Deorum nominibus appellant secretum illud, quod sola reverentia
vident" Later on, at Upsala for instance, they had images (Adam of
Bremen, Historia Ecclesiastica). Wuotan (Odin) signifies etymologi-
cally the All-Powerful, him who penetrates and circulates through
everything (Grimm, Mythol.)

a Scemundar Edda, Snorra Edda, ed. Copenhagen, three vols. passim.
Mr. Bergmann has translated several of these poems into French,
which Mr. Taine quotes. The translator has generally made use of
the edition of Mr. Thorpe, London. 1866.

CHAP. i. THE SAXONS. 53

benevolent, Thor the summer-thunder, who purifies the
air, and nourishes the earth with showers. Long
fought the gods against the frozen Jotuns, against the
dark bestial powers, the Wolf Fenrir, the great Serpent,
whom they drown in the sea, the treacherous Loki,
whom they bind to the rocks, beneath a viper whose
venom drops continually on his face. Long will the
heroes, who by a bloody death deserve to be placed
" in the halls of Odin, and there wage a combat every
day," assist the gods in their mighty war. A day will,
however, arrive when gods and men will be conquered.
Then

"trembles Yggdrasil's ash yet standing; groans that ancient
tree, and the Jotun Loki is loosed. The shadows groan on the
ways of Hel,1 until the fire of Surt has consumed the tree.
Hrym steers from the east, the waters rise, the mundane snake
is coiled in jcitun-rage. The worm beats the water, and the eagle
screams ; the pale of beak tears carcases ; (the ship) Naglfar is
loosed. Surt from the South comes with flickering flame ;
shines from his sword the Val-god's sun. The stony hills are
dashed together, the giantesses totter ; men tread the path of
Hel, and heaven is cloven. The sun darkens, earth in ocean
sinks, fall from heaven the bright stars, fire's breath assails the
all-nourishing tree, towering fire plays against heaven itself." 2

The gods perish, devoured one by one by the monsters ;
and the celestial legend, sad and grand now like the
life of man, bears witness to the hearts of warriors and
heroes.

There is no fear of pain, no care for life ; they count
it as dross when .the idea has seized upon them. The

1 Hel, the goddess of death, born of Loki and Angrboda. — TR.

2 Thorpe, The Edda of Scemund, The Vala's Prophtcy, str. 48-56,
p. 9 et passim.

54 THE SOURCE. BOOK L

trembling of the nerves, the repugnance of animal
instinct which starts "back before wounds and death,
are all lost in an irresistible determination. See how
in their epic1 the sublime springs up amid the horrible,
like a bright purple flower amid a pool of blood. Sigurd
has plunged his sword into the dragon Fafnir, and at
that very moment they looked on one another; and
Fafnir asks, as he dies, " Who art thou ? and who is
thy father ? and what thy kin, that thou wert so hardy
as to bear weapons against me?" "A hardy heart
urged me on thereto, and a strong hand and this sharp
sword. . . . Seldom hath hardy eld a faint-heart youth."
After this triumphant eagle's cry Sigurd cuts out the
worm's heart; but Eegin, brother of Fafnir, drinks
blood from the wound, and falls asleep. Sigurd, who
was roasting the heart, raises his finger thoughtlessly
to his lips. Forthwith he understands the language of
the birds. The eagles scream above him in the
branches. They warn him to mistrust Eegin. Sigurd
cuts off the latter's head, eats of Fafnir's heart, drinks
his blood and his brother's. Amongst all these murders
their courage and poetry grow. Sigurd has subdued
Brynhild, the untamed maiden, by passing through the
naming fire ; they share one couch for three nights, his
naked sword betwixt them. " Nor the damsel did he
kiss, nor did the Hunnish king to his arm lift her.
He the blooming maid to Giuki's son delivered,"
because, according to his oath, he must send her to
her betrothed Gunnar. She, setting her love upon

1 Fafn-ismdl Edda. This epic is common to the Northern races, as
is the Iliad to the Greek populations, and is fonnd almost entire in
Germany in the Nibdungen Lied. The translator has also used Magnus-
son and Morris' poetical version of the Volsunga Saga, and certs in
congs of the Elder Eddat London, 1870.

CHAP. i. THE SAXONS. 55

him, "Alone she sat without, at eve of day, began
aloud with herself to speak : ' Sigurd must be mine ;
I must die, or that blooming youth clasp in my arms.' "
But seeing him married, she brings about his death.
"Laughed then Brynhild, Budli's daughter, once only,
from her whole soul, when in her bed she listened to
the loud lament of Giuki's daughter." She put on her
golden corslet, pierced herself with the sword's point,
and as a last request said :

" Let in the plain be raised a pile so spacious, that for us all
like room may be ; let them burn the Hun (Sigurd) on the one
side of me, on the other side my household slaves, with collars
splendid, two at our heads, and two hawks • let also lie between
us both the keen-edged sword, as when we both one coueh
ascended ; also five female thralls, eight male slaves of gentle
birth fostered with me. " J

AH were burnt together; yet Gudrun the widow con-
tinued motionless by the corpse, and could not weep.
The wives of the jarls came to console her, and each
of them told her own sorrows, all the calamities of
great devastations and the old life of barbarism.

" Then spoke Giaflang, Giuki's sister : ' Lo, up on earth I live
most loveless, who of five mates must see the ending, of daugh-
ters twain and three sisters, of brethren eight, and abide behind
lonely. ' Then spake Herborg, Queen of Hunland : ' Crueller
tale have I to tell of my seven sons, down in the Southlands,
and the eight man, my mate, felled in the death-mead. Father
and mother, and four brothers on the wide sea the winds and
death played with ; the billows beat on the bulwark boards.
Alone must I sing o'er them, alone must I array them, alone
must my hands deal with their departing ; and all this was in

1 Thorpe, The Edda of Scemuiul, Third lay of Sigurd
str. 62-64, p. 83.

56 THE SOURCE. BOOK L

one season's wearing, and none was left for love or solace. Then
was I bound a prey of the battle when that same season wore
to its ending ; as a tiring may must I bind the shoon of the
duke's high dame, every day at dawning. From her jealous
hate gat I heavy mocking, cruel lashes she laid upon me.' " 1

All was in vain ; no word could draw tears from those
dry eyes. They were obliged to lay the bloody corpse
before her, ere her tears would come. Then tears flowed
through the pillow ; as " the geese withal that were in
the home-field, the fair fowls the may owned, fell a-
screaming." She would have died, like Sigrun, on the
corpse of him whom alone she had loved, if they had
not deprived her of memory by a magic potion. Thus
affected, she departs in order to marry Atli, king of the
Huns ; and yet she goes against her will, with gloomy
forebodings : for murder begets murder ; and her
brothers, the murderers of Sigurd, having been drawn
to Atli's court, fall in their turn into a snare like that
which they had themselves laid. Then Gunnar was
bound, and they tried to make him deliver up the
treasure. He answers with a barbarian's laugh :

" ' Hogni's heart in my hand shall lie, cut bloody from the
breast of the valiant chief, the king's son, with a dull-edged
knife.' They the heart cut out from Hialli's breast ; on a dish,
bleeding, laid it, and it to Gunnar bare. Then said Gunnar,
lord of men : ' Here have I the heart of the timid Hialli, unlike
the heart of the bold Hogni ; for much it trembles as in the dish
it lies ; it trembled more by half while in his breast it lay."
Hogni laughed when to his heart they cut the living crest-
crasher ; no lament uttered he. All bleeding on a dish they
laid it, and it to Gunnar bare. Calmly said Gunnar, the warrior

1 Magnusson and Morris, Story of the Volsungs and Nibelungs,
Lamentation of Gudrun, p. 118 et passim.

CHAP. i. THE SAXONS. 57

Niflung : ' Here have I the heart of the bold Hogni, unlike the
heart of the timid Hialli ; for it little trembles as in the dish it
lies : it trembled less while in his breast it lay. So far shalt
thou, Atli ! be from the eyes of men as thou wilt from the
treasures be. In my power alone is all the hidden Niflung's
gold, now that Hogni lives not. Ever was I wavering while we
both lived • now am I so no longer, as I alone survive.' " l

It was the last insult of the self-confident man, who
values neither his own life nor that of another, so that
he can satiate his vengeance. They cast him into the
seipent's den, and there he died, striking his harp with
his foot. But the inextinguishable flame of vengeance
passed from his heart to that of his sister. Corpse after
coipse fall on each other; a mighty fury hurls them
open-eyed to death. She killed the children she had
by Atli, and one day on his return from the carnage,
gave him their hearts to eat, served in honey, and
laughed coldly as she told him on what he had fed.
" Uproar was on the benches, portentous the cry of men,
noise beneath the costly hangings. The children of
the Huns wept ; all wept save Gudrun, who never
wept or for her bear-fierce brothers, or for her dear sons,
young, simple."2 Judge from this heap of ruin and
carnage to what excess the will is strung. There were
men amongst them, Berserkirs,8 who in battle seized
with a sort of madness, showed a sudden and super-
human strength, and ceased to feel their wounds. This
is the conception of a hero as engendered by this race
in its infancy. Is it not strange to see them place

Thorpe, The Edda of Suemund, Lay of Mli, str. 21-27, p. 117.
2 Ibid. str. 38, p. 119.

8 This word signifies men who fought without a breastplate, perhaps
m shirts only ; Scottice, " Baresarks." — TR.

58 THE SOURCE. BOOK i.

their happiness in battle, their beauty in death ? Is
there any people, Hindoo, Persian, Greek, or Gallic,
which has formed so tragic a conception of life ? Is
there any which has peopled its infantine mind with
such gloomy dreams ? Is there any which has so
entirely banished from its dreams the sweetness of en-
joyment, and the softness of pleasure? Endeavours,
tenacious and mournful endeavours, an ecstasy of
endeavours — such was their chosen condition. Carlyle
said well, that in the sombre obstinacy of an English
labourer still survives the tacit rage of the Scandinavian
warrior. Strife for strife's sake — such is their pleasure.
With what sadness, madness, destruction, such a dispo-
sition breaks its bonds, we shall see in Shakspeare and
Byron; with what vigour and purpose it can limit
and employ itself when possessed by moral ideas, we
shall see in the case of the Puritans.

IV.

They have established themselves in England ; and
however disordered the society which binds them to-
gether, it is founded, as in Germany, on generous
sentiment. "War is at every door, I am aware, but
warlike virtues are within every house ; courage chiefly,
then fidelity. Under the brute there is a free man,
and a man of spirit. There is no man amongst them
who, at his own risk,1 will not make alliance, go forth
to fight, undertake adventures. There is no group of
free men amongst them, who, in their Witenagemote, is
not for ever concluding alliances one with another.
Every clan, in its own district, forms a league of which

1 See the Life of Sweyn, of Hereward, etc. , even up to the time of
e Conquest.

CHAP. i. THE SAXONS. 59

all the members, " brothers of the sword/' defend each
other, and demand revenge for the spilling of blood, at
the price of their own. Every chief in his hall reckons
that he has friends, not mercenaries, in the faithful ones
who drink his beer, and who, having received us marks
of his esteem and confidence, bracelets, swords, and suits
of armour, will cast themselves between him and danger
on the day of battle.1 Independence and boldness rage
amongst this young nation with violence and excess ;
but these are of themselves noble things ; and no less
noble are the sentiments which serve them for disci-
pline,— to wit, an affectionate devotion, and respect for
plighted faith. These appear in their laws, and break
forth in their poetry. Amongst them greatness of heart
gives matter for imagination. Their characters are not
selfish and shifty, like those of Homer. They are brave
hearts, simple and strong, faithful to their relatives, to
their master in arms, firm and steadfast to enemies and
friends, abounding in courage, and ready for sacrifice.
" Old as I am," says one, " I will not budge hence. I
mean to die by my lord's side, near this man I have loved
so much. He kept his word, the word he had given to
his chief, to the distributor of gifts, promising him that
they should return to the town, safe and sound to their
homes, or that they would fall both together, in the thick
of the carnage, covered with wounds. He lies by his
master's side, like a faithful servant." Though awkward
in speech, their old poets find touching words when they
have to paint these manly friendships. We cannot
without emotion hear them relate how the old "king
embraced the best of his thanes, and put his arms about
his neck, how the tears flowed down the cheeks of the

1 Beowulf, passim, Death of Byrhtnoth.

60 THE SOUKCE. BOOK i.

greyhaired chief. . . . The valiant man was so dear to
him. He could not stop the flood which mounted from
his breast. In his heart, deep in the chords of his soul,
he sighed in secret after the beloved man." Few as are
the songs which remain to us, they return to this" subject
again and again. The wanderer in a reverie dreams
about his lord i1 It seems to him in his spirit as if he
kisses and embraces him, and lays head and hands upon
his knees, as oft before in the olden time, when he
rejoiced in his gifts. Then he wakes — a man without
friends. He sees before him the desert tracks, the
seabirds dipping in the waves, stretching wide their
wings, the frost and the snow, mingled with falling
hail. Then his heart's wounds press more heavily.
The exile says : —

"In blithe habits full oft we, too, agreed that nought else
should divide us except death alone ; at length this is changed,
and as if it had never been is now our friendship. To endure
enmities* man orders me to dwell in the bowers of the forest,
under the oak tree in this earthy cave. Cold is this earth-
dwelling : I am quite wearied out. Dim are the dells, high up
are the mountains, a bitter city of twigs, with briars overgrown,
a joyless abode. . . . My friends are in the earth ; those loved
in life, the tomb holds them. The grave is guarding, while I
above alone am going. Under the oak-tree, beyond this earth-
cave, there I must sit the long summer-day."

Amid their perilous mode of life, and the perpetual
appeal to arms, there exists no sentiment more warm
than friendship, nor any virtue stronger than loyalty.

Thus supported by powerful affection and trysted
word, society is kepf, wholesome. Marriage is like the

1 The Wanderer, the Exile's Song, Codex Exoniensis, published b?
Thorpe.

CHAP. L THE SAXONS. 61

state. We find women associating with the men, at
their feasts, sober and respected.1 She speaks, and they
listen to her ; no need for concealing or enslaving her, in
order to restrain or retain her. She is a person, and not
a thing. The law demands her consent to marriage, sur-
rounds her with guarantees, accords her protection. She
can inherit, possess, bequeath, appear in courts of justice,
in county assemblies, in the great congress of the
elders. Frequently the name of the queen and of several
other ladies is inscribed in the proceedings of the
Witenagemote. Law and tradition maintain her in-
tegrity, as if she were a man, and side by side with
men. Her affections captivate her, as if she were a
man, and side by side with men. In Alfred2 there is a
portrait of the wife, which for purity and elevation
equals all that we can devise with our modern re-
finements. "Thy wife now lives for thee — for thee
alone. She has enough of all kind of wealth for this
present life, but she scorns them all for thy sake alone.
She has forsaken them all, because she had not thee with
them. Thy absence makes her think that all she pos-
sesses is nought. Thus, for love of thee, she is wasted
away, and lies near death for tears and grief." Already,
in the legends of the Edda, we have seen the maiden
Sigrun at the tomb of Helgi, " as glad as the voracious
hawks of Odin, when they of slaughter know, of warm
prey," desiring to sleep still in the arms of death, and
die at last on his grave. Nothing here like the love we
find in the primitive poetiy of France, Provence, Spain,
and Greece. There is an absence of gaiety, of delight ;

1 Turner, Hist. Angl. Sax. iii. 63.

* Alfred borrows his portrait from Boethius, but almost entirely re-
writes it.

62 THE SOURCE. BOOK i.

outside of marriage it is only a ferocious appetite, an
outbreak of the instinct of the beast. It appears nowhere
with its charm and its smile ; there is no love song in
this ancient poetry. The reason is, that with them love
is not an amusement and a pleasure, but a promise and
a devotion. All is grave, even sombre, in civil relations
as well as in conjugal society. As in Germany, amid
the sadness of a melancholic temperament and the
savagery of a barbarous life, the most tragic human
faculties, the deep power of love and the grand power of
will, are the only ones that sway and act.

This is why the hero, as in Germany, is truly heroic.
Let us speak of him at length ; we possess one of then
poems, that of Beowulf, almost entire. Here are the
stories, which the Thanes, seated on their stools, by the
light of their torches, listened to as they drank the ale of
their king : we can glean thence their manners and
sentiments, as in the Iliad and the Odyssey those of the
Greeks. Beowulf is a hero, a knight-errant before the
days of chivalry, as the leaders of the German bands
were feudal chiefs before the institution of feudalism.1
He has "rowed upon the sea, his naked sword hard in
his hand, amidst the fierce waves and coldest of storms,
and the rage of winter hurtled over the waves of the
deep." The sea-monsters, "the many coloured foes, drew
him to the bottom of the sea, and held him fast in their
gripe." But he reached "the wretches with his point and
with his war-bill." "The mighty sea-beast received the
war-rush through his hands," and he slew nine Nicors

1 Kemble thinks that the origin of this poem is very ancient, perhaps
contemporary with the invasion of the Angles and Saxons, but that the
version we possess is later than the seventh century. — Kemble 's Beo-
, text and translation, 1833. The characters are Danish

CHAP. i. THE SAXONS. 63

(sea-monsters). And now behold him, as ne comes across
the waves to succour the old King Hrothgar, who with
his vassals sits afflicted in his great mead-hall, high and
curved with pinnacles. For " a grim stranger, Grendel,
a mighty haunter of the marshes," had entered his hall
during the night, seized thirty of the thanes who were
asleep, and returned in his war-craft with their car-
casses ; for twelve years the dreadful ogre, the beastly
and . greedy creature, father of Orks and Jotuns, de-
voured men and emptied the best of houses. Beowulf,
the great warrior, offers to grapple with the fiend, and
foe to foe contend for life, without the bearing of either
sword or ample shield, for he has "learned also that
the wretch for his cursed hide recketh not of weapons,"
asking only that if death takes him, they will bear
forth his bloody corpse and bury it ; mark his fen-
dwelling, and send to Hygelac, his chief, the best of
war-shrouds that guards his breast.

He is lying in the hall, " trusting in his proud
strength ; and when the mists of night arose, lo,
Grendel comes, tears open the door," seized a sleeping
warrior : " he tore him unawares, he bit his body, he
drank the blood from the veins, he swallowed him
svith continual tearings." But Beowulf seized him in
turn, and " raised himself upon his elbow."

" The lordly hall thundered, the ale was spilled . . . both
were enraged ; savage and strong warders ; the house resounded ;
then was it a great wonder that the wine-hall withstood the
beasts of war, that it fell not upon the earth, the fair palace ;
but it was thus fast. . . . The noise arose, new enough; a
fearful terror fell on the North Danes, on each of those who
from the wnll heard the outcry, God's denier sing his dreadful

64 THE SOURCE BOOK L

lay, his song of defeat, lament his wound/ . . . The foul wretch
awaited the mortal wound ; a mighty ga-sh was evident upon
his shoulder ; the sinews sprung asunder, the junctures of the
bones burst ; success in war was given to Beowulf. Thence
must Grendel fly sick unto death, among the refuges of the fens,
to seek his joyless dwelling. He all the better knew that the
end of his life, the number of his days was gone by." 2

For he had left on the ground, "hand, arm, and shoulder;"
and " in the lake of Nicors, where he was driven, the
rough wave was boiling with blood, the foul spring of
waves all mingled, hot with poison ; the dye, discoloured
with death, bubbled with warlike gore." There re-
mained a female monster, his mother, who like him
" was doomed to inhabit the terror of waters, the cold
streams," who came by night, and amidst drawn swords
tore and devoured another man, ^Eschere, the king's
best friend. A lamentation arose in the palace, and
Beowulf offered himself again. They went to the den,
a hidden land, the refuge of the wolf, near the windy
promontories, where a mountain stream rusheth down-
wards under the darkness of the hills, a flood beneath
the earth ; the wood fast by its roots overshadoweth
the water ; there may one by night behold a marvel,
fire upon the flood : the stepper over the heath, when
wearied out by the hounds, sooner will give up his
soul, his life upon the brink, than plunge therein to
hide his head. Strange dragons and serpents swam
there ; " from time to time the horn sang a dirge, a
terrible song." Beowulf plunged into the wave, de-
scended, passed monsters who tore his coat of mail, to
the ogress, the hateful manslayer, who, seizing him in
her grasp, bore him off to ber dwelling. A pale gleam

1 Kemble's Beowulf, xi. p. 32 2 Ibid. xii. p. 34.

CHAP. i. THE SAXONS. 65

shone brightly, and there, face to face, the good cham-
pion perceived

" the she-wolf of the abyss, the mighty sea-woman ; he gave the
war-onset with his battle-bill ; he held not back the swing of
the sword, so that on her head the ring-mail sang aloud a greedy
war-song. ... The beam of war would not bite. Then
caught the prince of the War-Geats Grendel's mother by the
shoulder . . . twisted the homicide, so that she bent upon
the floor. . . . She drew her knife broad, brown-edged (and
tried to pierce), the twisted breast-net which protected his
life. . . . Then saw he among the weapons a bill fortunate
in victory, an old gigantic sword, doughty of edge, ready for
use, the work of giants. He seized the belted hilt ; the
warrior of the Scyldings, fierce and savage whirled the ring-
mail ; despairing of life, he struck furiously, so that it grappled
hard with her about her neck ; it broke the bone-rings, the bill
passed through all the doomed body ; she sank upon the floor ;
the sword was bloody, the man rejoiced in his deed ; the beam
shone, light stood within, even as from heaven mildly shines the
lamp of the firmament." *

Then he saw Grendel dead in a corner of the hall ; and
four of his companions, having with difficulty raised
the monstrous head, bore it by the hair to the palace
of the king.

That was hjs first labour ; and the rest of his life
was similar. When he had reigned fifty years on
earth, a dragon, who had been robbed of his treasure,
came from the hill and burned men and houses " with
waves of fire." "Then did the refuge of earls com-
mand to make for' Mm a variegated shield, all of iron :
he knew well enough that a shield of wood could not
help him, lindenwood opposed to fire. . . . The prince

1 Beowulf, xxii. xxiii. p. 62 et passim.
VOL. I. F

66 THE SOURCE. BOOK i.

of rings was then too proud to seek the wide flier with
a troop, with a large company ; he feared not for himself
that battle, nor did he make any account of the dragon's
war, his lahoriousness and valour." And yet he was
sad, and went unwillingly, for he was " fated to abide
the end." Then " he was ware of a cavern, a mound
under the earth, nigh to the sea wave, the clashing of
waters, which cave was full within of embossed orna-
ments and wires. . . . Then the king, hard in war sat
upon the promontory, whilst he, the prince of the
Geats, bade farewell to his household comrades. . . .
I, the old guardian of my people, seek a feud." He
" let words proceed from his breast/ the dragon came,
vomiting fire ; the blade bit not his body, and the king
" suffered painfully, involved in fire." His comrades
had " turned to the wood, to save their lives," all save
Wiglaf, who " went through the fatal smoke," knowing
well " that it was not the old custom " to abandon rela-
tion and prince, " that he alone . . . shall suffer dis-
tress, shall sink in battle." " The worm came furious,
the foul insidious stranger, variegated with waves of
fire, . . . hot and warlike fierce, he clutched the whole
neck with bitter banes ; he was bloodied with life-gore,
the blood boiled in waves."1 They, with their swords,
carved the worm in the midst. Yet the wound of the
king became burning and swelled ; " he soon discovered
that poison boiled in his breast witliin, and sat by the
wall upon a stone " ; " he looked upon the work of
giants, how the eternal cavern held within stone arches
fast upon pillars." Then he said—

" I have held this people fifty years ; there was not any king
of my neighbours, who dared to greet me with warriors, to oppress
1 Beowulf, xxxiii. -xxxvi. p. 94 et passim.

CHAP. i. THE SAXONS. 67

ine with terror. ... I held mine own well, I sought not treach-
erous malice, nor swore unjustly many oaths ; on account of all
this, I, sick with mortal wounds, may have joy. . . . Now do
thou go immediately to behold the hoard under the hoary stone,
my dear Wiglaf. . . . Now, I have purchased with my death a
hoard of treasures ; it will be yet of advantage at the need of
the people. ... I give thanks . . . that I might before my dying
day obtain such for my peoples . . . longer may I not here be." l

This is thorough and real generosity, not exaggerated
and pretended, as it will be later on in the romantic
imaginations of babbling clerics, mere composers of
adventure. Fiction as yet is not far removed from
fact : the man breathes manifest beneath the hero.
Rude as the poetry is, its hero is grand; he is so,
simply by his deeds. Faithful, first to his prince, then
to his people, he went alone, in a strange land, to
venture himself for the delivery of his fellow-men ; he
forgets himself in death, while thinking only that it
profits others. " Each one of us," he says in one place,
"must abide the end of his present life." Let. there-
fore, each do justice, if he can, before his death. Com-
pare with him the monsters whom he destroys, the last
traditions of the ancient wars against inferior races, and
of the primitive religion ; think of his life of danger,
nights upon the waves, man grappling with the brute
creation; man's indomitable will crushing the breasts
of beasts ; man's powerful muscles which, when exerted,
tear the fiesh of the monsters : you will see reappear
through the mist of legends, and under the light of
poetry, the valiant men who, amid the madness of war
and the raging of their own mood, began to settle a
people and to found a state.

1 Bevwulf, xxxvii. xxxviii. p. 110 et passim. I have throughout
always used the very words of Keiuble'a translation.- TH.

68 THE SOURCE. BOOK i

V.

One poem nearly whole and two or three fragments
are all that remain of this lay-poetry of England. The
rest of the pagan current, German and barbarian, was
arrested or overwhelmed, first by the influx of the
Christian religion, then by the conquest of the Norman-
French. But what remains more than suffices to show
the strange and powerful poetic genius of the race, and
to exhibit beforehand the flower in the bud.

If there has ever been anywhere a deep and serious
poetic sentiment, it is here. They do not speak, they
sing, or rather they shout. Each little verse is an accla-
mation, which breaks forth like a growl ; their strong
breasts heave with a groan of anger or enthusiasm, and
a vehement or indistinct phrase or expression rises sud-
denly, almost in spite of them, to their lips. There is no
art, no natural talent, for describing singly and in order
the different parts of an object or an event. The fifty
rays of light which every phenomenon emits in succes-
sion to a regular and well-directed intellect, come to
them at once in a glowing and confused mass, disabling
them by their force and convergence. Listen to their
genuine war-chants, unchecked and' violent, as became
their terrible voices. To this day, at fchis distance of
time, separated as they are by manners,- speech, ten
centuries, we seem to hear them still : —

" The army goes forth : the birds sing, the cricket chirps, the
war-weapons sound, the lance clangs against the shield. Now
shineth the moon, wandering under the sky. Now arise deeds
'of woe, which the enmity of this people prepares to do. ...
Then in the court came the tumult of war-carnage. They seized
with their hands the hollow wood of the shield. They smote
through the bones of the head. The roofs of the castle resounded

CHAP. i. THE SAXONS. 69

until Garulf fell in battle, the first of earth dwelling men, son
of Guthlaf. Around him lay many brave men dying. The
raven whirled about, dark and sombre, like a willow leaf. There
was a sparkling of blades, as if all Finsburg were on fire. Never
have I heard of a more worthy bat tie. in war." l

This is the song on Athelstan's victory at Brunanburh :

" Here Athelstan king, of earls the lord, the giver of the
bracelets of the nobles, and his brother also, Edmund the aethel-
ing, the Elder a lasting glory won by slaughter in battle, with
the edges of swords, at Brunanburh. The wall of shields they
cleaved, they hewed the noble banners : with the rest of the
family, the children of Edward. . . . Pursuing, they destroyed
the Scottish people and the ship-fleet. . . . The field was
coloured with the warrior's blood ! After that the sun on high,
. . . the greatest star ! glided over the earth, God's candle
bright ! till the noble creature hastened to her setting. There
lay soldiers many with darts struck down, Northern men over
their shields shot. So were the Scots ; weary of ruddy battle.
. . . Ths screamers of war they left behind ; the raven to enjoy,
the dismal kite, and the black raven with horned beak, and the
hoarse toad ; the eagle, afterwards to feast on the white flesh ;
the greedy battle-hawk, and the grey beast, the wolf in the
wood."2

Here all is imagery. In their impassioned minds
events are not bald, with the dry propriety of an exact
description ; each fits in with its pomp of sound, shape,
colouring; it is almost a vision which is raised, com-
plete, with its accompanying emotions, joy, fury, ex-
citement. In their speech, arrows are "the serpents of
Hel, shot from bows of horn;" ships are "great sea-

.l Conybeare'.s Illustrations of Anglo-Saxon Poeti~y, 1826, Battle oj
Finsborough, p. 175. The complete collection of Anglo-Saxon poetry
has been published by M. Grein.

a Turner, Hist, of Anglo-Saxons, iii., book 9, ch. i. p. 245-

70 THE SOURCE. BOOK i.

steeds/' the sea is "a chalice of waves/' the helmet is
" the castle of the head :" they need an extraordinary
speech to express their vehement sensations, so that after
a time, in Iceland, where this kind of poetry was carried
on to excess, the earlier inspiration failed, art replaced
nature, the Skalds were reduced to a distorted and obscure
jargon. But whatever be the imagery, here as in Iceland,
though unique, it is too feeble. The poets have not
satisfied their inner emotion if it is only expressed by a
single word. Time after time they return to and re-
peat their idea. " The sun on high, the great star, God's
brilliant candle, the noble creature ! " Four times suc-
cessively they employ the same thought, and each time
under a new aspect. All its different aspects rise
simultaneously before the barbarian's eyes, and each word
was like a fit of the semihallucination which possessed
him. Verily, in such a condition, the regularity of
speech and cf ideas is disturbed at every turn. The
succession of thought in the visionary is not the same
as in a reasoning mind. One colour induces another;
from sound he passes to sound ; his imagination is like
a diorama of unexplained pictures. His phrases recur
and change : he emits the word that comes to his lips
without hesitation; he leaps over wide intervals from idea
to idea. The more his mind is transported, the quicker
and wider the intervals traversed. With one spring
he visits the poles of his horizon, and touches in one
moment objects which seemed to have the world between
them. His ideas are entangled without order ; without
notice, abruptly, the poet will return to the idea he has
quitted, and insert it in the thought to which he is
giving expression. It is impossible to translate these in-
congruous ideas, which quite disconcert our modern style.

CIIAP. i. THE SAXONS. 71

At times they are unintelligible.1 Articles, particles,
everything capable of illuminating thought, of marking
the connection of terms, of producing regularity of ideas,
all rational and logical artifices, are neglected.2 Passion
bellows forth like a great shapeless beast ; and that is all.
It rises and starts in little abrupt lines ; it is the acme
of barbarism. Homer's happy poetry is copiously de-
veloped, in full narrative, with rich and extended
imagery. All the details of a complete picture are not
too much for him ; he loves to look at things, he lingers
over them, rejoices in their beauty, dresses them in
splendid words ; he is like the Greek girls, who thought
themselves ugly if they did not bedeck arms and
shoulders with all the gold coins from their purse, and
all the treasures from their caskets ; his long verses flow
by with their cadences, and spread out like a purple robe
under an Ionian sun. Here the clumsy-fingered poet
crowds and clashes his ideas in a narrow measure;
if measure there be, he barely observes it ; all his orna-
ment is three words beginning with the same letter.
His chief care is to abridge, to imprison thought in a
kind of mutilated cry.3 The force of the internal im-
pression, which, not knowing how to unfold itself,
becomes condensed and doubled by accumulation; the
harshness of the outward expression, which, subservient

1 The cleverest Anglo-Saxon scholars, Turner, Conybeare, Thorpe
recognise this difficulty.

2 Turner, iii. 231, et passim. The translations in French, however
literal, do injustice to the text ; that language is too clear, too logical.
No Frenchman can understand this extraordinary phase of intellect,
except by taking a dictionary, and deciphering some pages of Anglo-
Saxon for a fortnight.

3 Turner remarks that the same idea expressed by King Alfred, in
prose and then in verse, takes in the first case seven words, in the second
five. — History of the Anglo-Saxons, iii. 235.

72 THE SOURCE. BOOK L

to the energy and shocks of the inner sentiment, seeks
only to exhibit it intact and original, in spite of and
at the expense of all order and beauty, — such are the
characteristics of their poetry, and these also will be
the characteristics of the poetry which is to follow.

VI.

A race so constituted was predisposed to Christianity,
by its gloom, its aversion to sensual and reckless living,
its inclination for the serious and sublime. When
their sedentary habits had reconciled their souls to
a long period of ease, and weakened the fury which
fed their sanguinary religion, they readily inclined
to a new faith. The vague adoration of the great
powers of nature, which eternally fight for mutual de-
struction, and, when destroyed, rise up again to the
combat, had long since disappeared in the dim distance.
Society, on its formation, introduced the idea of peace
and the need for justice, and the war-gods faded from
the minds of men, with the passions which had created
them. A century and a half after the invasion by the
Saxons,1 Eoman missionaries, bearing a silver cross
with a picture of Christ, came in procession chanting a
litany. Presently the high priest of the Northumbrians
declared in presence of the nobles that the old gods
were powerless, and confessed that formerly " he knew
nothing of that which he adored ;" and he among the
first, lance in hand, assisted to demolish their temple.
Then a chief rose in the assembly, and said :

"You remember, it may be, 0 king, that which sometimes
happens in winter when you are seated at table with your earls
and thanes. Your fire is lighted, and your hall warmed, and
1 596-625. Aug. Thierry, i. 81 ; Bede, xil 2.

CHAP. i. THE SAXONS. 73

without is rain and snow and storm. Then comes a swallow
flying across the hall ; he enters by one door, and leaves by
another. The brief moment while he is within is pleasant to
him ; he feels not rain nor cheerless winter weather ; but the
moment is brief — the bird flies away in the twinkling of an
eye, and he passes from winter to winter. Such, methinks, is
the life of man on earth, compared with the uncertain time
beyond. It appears for a while ; but what is the time which
comes after — the time which was before 1 We know not. If,
then, this new doctrine may teach us somewhat of greater cer-
tainty, it were well that we should regard it."

This restlessness, this feeling of the infinite and dark
beyond, this sober, melancholy eloquence, were the har-
bingers of spiritual life.1 We find nothing like it
amongst the nations of the south, naturally pagan, and
preoccupied with the present life. These utter bar-
barians embrace Christianity straightway, through sheer
force of mood and clime. To no purpose are they brutal,
heavy, shackled by infantine superstitions, capable, like
King Canute, of buying for a hundred golden talents the
arm of Augustine. They possess the idea of God. This
grand God' of the Bible, omnipotent and unique, who
disappears almost entirely in the middle ages,2 obscured
by His court and His family, endures amongst them
in spite of absurd or grotesque legends. They do not
blot Him out under pious romances, by the elevation
of the saints, or under feminine caresses, to benefit
the infant Jesus and the Virgin. Their grandeur and
their severity raise them to His high level ; they are
not tempted, like artistic and talkative nations, to
replace religion by a fair and agreeable narrative,
More than any race in Europe, they approach, by the

1 JoutFroy, Problem of Human Destiny.
a Michelet, preface to La Renaissance ; Didron, -Hixtoire de Dieu.

74 THE SOURCE. TJOOK i.

simplicity and energy of their conceptions, the old
Hebraic spirit. Enthusiasm is their natural condition ;
and their new Deity fills them with admiration, as
their ancient deities inspired them with fury. They
have hymns, genuine odes, which are but a concrete of
exclamations. They have no development; they are
incapable of restraining or explaining their passion ; it
bursts forth, in raptures, at the vision of the Almighty.
The heart alone speaks here — a strong, barbarous heart.
Csedmon, their old poet/ says Bede, was a more igno-
rant man than the others, who knew no poetry; so
that in the hall, when they handed him the harp,
he was obliged to withdraw, being unable to sing like
his companions. Once, keeping night-watch over the
stable, he fell asleep. A stranger appeared to him,
and asked him to sing something, and these words
came into his head : " Now we ought to praise the Lord
of heaven, the power of the Creator, and His skill, the
deeds of the Father of glory ; how He, being eternal
God, is the author of all marvels ; who, almighty
guardian of the human race, created first for the sons
of men the heavens as the roof of their dwelling, and
then the earth." Eemembering this when he woke,2
he came to the town, and they brought him before the
learned men, before the abbess Hilda, who, when they
had heard him, thought that he had received a gift
from heaven, and made him a monk in the abbey.
There he spent his life listening to portions of Holy
Writ, which were explained to him in Saxon, "rumi-
nating over them like a pure animal, turned them into
most sweet verse/' Thus is true poetry born. These
men pray with all the emotion of a new soul; they
kneel ; they adore ; the less they know the more they

1 About 630. Sec Codex Exontinsis, Thorpe. 2 Bede, iv. 24.

CHAP. i. THE SAXONS. 75

think. Some one has said that the first and most
sincere hymn is this one word 0 ! Theirs were hardly
longer; they only repeated time after time some deep
passionate word, with monotonous vehemence. " In
heaven art Thou, our aid and succour, resplendent with
happiness ! All things bow before thee, before the glory
of Thy Spirit. With one voice they call upon Christ ;
they all cry : Holy, holy art thou, King of the angels of
heaven, our Lord ! and Thy judgments are just and
great : they reign for ever and in all places, in the
multitude of Thy works." We are reminded of the
songs of the servants of Odin, tonsured now, and clad in
the garments of monks. Their poetry is the same ; they
think of God, as of Odin, in a string of short, accumu-
lated, passionate images, like a succession of lightning-
flashes ; the Christian hymns are a sequel to the pagan.
One of them, Adlielm, stood on a bridge leading to the
town where he lived, and repeated warlike and profane
odes as well as religious poetry, in order to attract and
instruct the men of his time. He could do it without
changing his key. In one of them, a funeral song,
Death speaks. It was one of the last Saxon composi-
tions, containing a terrible Christianity, which seems at
the same time to have sprung from the blackest depths
of the Edda. The brief metre sounds abruptly, with
measured stroke, like the passing bell. It is as if we
hear the dull resounding responses which roll through
the church, while the rain beats on the dim glass, and
the broken clouds sail mournfully in the sky; and our
eyes, glued to the pale face of a dead man, feel before-
hand the horror of the damp grave into which the living
are about to cast him.

" For thee was a house built ere thou wert born ; for thee

76 THE SOURCE. BOOK i.

was a mould shapen ere thou of thy mother earnest. Its height
is not determined, nor its depth measured ; nor is it closed up
(however long it may be) until I thee bring where thou shalt
remain ; until I shall measure thee and the sod of the earth.
Thy house is not highly built ; it is unhigh and low. When
thou art in it, the heel-ways are low, the side-ways unhigh.
The roof is built thy breast full nigh ; so thou shalt in earth
dwell full cold, dim, and dark. Doorless is that house, and dark
it is within. There thou art fast detained, and Death holds the
key. Loathly is that earth-house, and grim to dwell in. There
thou shalt dwell, and worms shall share thee. Thus thou art
laid, and leavest thy friends. Thou hast no friend that will
come to thee, who will ever inquire how that house liketh thee,
who shall ever open for thee the door, and seek thee, for soon
thou becomest loathly and hateful to look upon." l

Has Jeremy Taylor a more gloomy picture ? The two
religious poetries, Christian and pagan, are so like, that
one might mingle their incongruities, images, and legends.
In Beowulf, altogether pagan, the Deity appears as Odin,
more mighty and serene, and differs from the other only
as a peaceful Bretwalda2 differs from an adventurous
and heroic bandit-chief. The Scandinavian monsters,
Jotuns, enemies of the ^Esir,3 have not vanished ; but
they descend from Cain, and the giants drowned by
the flood.4 Their new hell is nearly the ancient Nas-
trand,5 " a dwelling deadly cold, full of bloody eagles
and pale adders;" and the dreadful last day of judg-

1 Conybeare's Illustrations, p. 271.

2 Bretwalda was a species of war-king, or temporary and elective
chief of all the Saxons.— TR.

8 The Msir (sing. As) are the gods of the Scandinavian nations, o/
wliom Odin was the chief. — TR.

4 Kemble, i. i. xii. In this chapter he has collected many features
which show the endurance of the ancient mythology.

6 Nawtrand is the strand or shore of the dead.— T R.

CHAP. i. THE SAXONS. 77

ment, when all will crumble into dusfc, and make way
for a purer world, resembles the final destruction of
Edda, that " twilight of the gods," which will end in a
victorious regeneration, an everlasting joy "under a
fairer sun."

By this natural conformity they were able to make
their religious poems indeed poems. Power in spiritual
productions arises only .from the sincerity of personal
and original sentiment. If they can relate religious
tragedies, it is because their soul was tragic, and in a
degree biblical. They introduce into their verses, like
the old prophets of Israel, their fierce vehemence, their
murderous hatreds, their fanaticism, all the shudderings
of their flesh and blood. One of them, whose poem is
mutilated, has related the history of Judith — with
what inspiration we shall see. It needed a barbarian
to display in such strong light excesses, tumult, murder,
vengeance, and combat.

" Then was Holofernes exhilarated with wine ; in the halls of
his guests he laughed and shouted, he roared and dinned. Then
might the children of men afar off hear how the stern one stormed
and clamoured, animated and elated with wine. He admonished
amply that they should bear it well to those sitting on the bench.
So was the wicked one over all the day, the lord and his men,
drunk with wine, the stern dispenser of wealth ; till that they
swimming lay over drunk, all his nobility, as they were death-
slain." l

The night having arrived, he commands them to
bring into his tent " the illustrious virgin ; " then,
going in to visit her, he falls drunk on his bed. The
moment was come for "the maid of the Creator, the
holy woman."

* Turner, Hist, of Anglo-Saxons, iii. book 9. ch. 3, p. 27L

78 THE SOURCE. BOOK i.

" She took the heathen man fast by his hair ; she drew him
by his limbs towards her disgracefully ; and the mischief-ful
odious man at her pleasure laid ; so as the wretch she might the
easiest well command. She with the twisted locks struck the
hateful enemy, meditating hate, with the red sword, till she had
half cut off his neck ; so that he lay in a swoon, drunk and
mortally wounded. He was not then dead, not entirely lifeless.
She struck then earnest, the woman illustrious in strength,
another time the heathen hound, till that his head rolled forth
upon the floor. The foul one lay without a coffer ; backward
his spirit turned under the abyss, and there was plunged below,
with sulphur fastened ; for ever afterwards wounded by worms.
Bound in torments," hard imprisoned, in hell he burns. After
his course he need not hope, with darkness overwhelmed, that
he may escape from that mansion of worms ; but there he shall
remain ; ever and ever, without end, henceforth in that cavern-
house, void of the joys of hope." ]

Has -any one ever heard a sterner accent of satisfied
hate ? When Clovis listened to the Passion play, he
cried, " Why was I not there with my Franks ! " So
here the old warrior instinct swelled into flame over
the Hebrew wars. As soon as Judith returned,

" Men under helms (went out) from the holy city at the dawn
itself. They dinned shields ; men roared loudly. At this
rejoiced the lank wolf in the wood, and the wan raven, the fowl
greedy of slaughter, both from the west, that the sons of men
for them should have thought to prepare their fill on corpses.
And to them flew in their paths the active devourer, the eagle,
hoary in his feathers. The willowed kite, with his horned beak,
sang the song of Hilda. The noble warriors proceeded, they in
mail, to the battle, furnished with shields, with swelling banners.
... They then speedily let fly forth showers of arrows, the
serpents of Hilda, from their horn bows ; the spears on the
1 Turner, Hist* of Anglo-Saxons, iii. book 9, ch. 3, p. 272.

CHAP. i. THE SAXONS. 79

ground hard stormed. Loud raged the plunderers of battle ;
they sent their darts into the throng of the chiefs. . . . They
that awhile before the reproach of the foreigners, the taunts of
the heathen endured." l

Amongst all these unknown poets2 there is one
whose name we know, Csedmon, perhaps the old Csed-
mon who wrote the first hymn ; like him, at all events,
who, paraphrasing the Bible with a barbarian's vigour
and sublimity, has shown the grandeur and fury of the
sentiment with which the men of these times entered
into their new religion. He also sings when he speaks ;
when he mentions the ark, it is with a profusion of
poetic names, " the floating house, the greatest of float-
ing chambers, the wooden fortress, the moving roof,
the cavern, the great sea-chest/' and many more.
Every time he thinks of it, he sees it with his mind,
like a quick luminous vision, and each time under a
new aspect, now undulating on the muddy waves,
between two ridges of foam, now casting over the water
its enormous shadow, black and high like a castle,
"now enclosing in its cavernous sides" the endless
swarm of caged beasts. Like the others, he wrestles
with God in his heart; triumphs like a warrior ovei
destruction and victory ; and in relating the death of
Pharaoh, can hardly speak from anger, or see, because
the blood mounts to his eyes :

" The folk was affrighted, the flood-dread seized on their sad
souls ; ocean wailed with death, the mountain heights were with
blood besteamed, the sea foamed gore, crying was in the waves,
the water full of weapons, a death-mist rose ; the Egyptians
were turned back ; trembling they fled, they felt fear : would

1 Turner, Hist, of Anglo-Saxons, iii. book 9, ch. 3, p. 274.
- Grein, Bibliotkek der AngeLsachsischen, i*>esie.

80 THE SOURCE. BOOK L

that host gladly find their homes ; their vaunt grew sadder :
against them, as a cloud, rose the fell rolling of the waves : there
came not any of that host to home, but from behind inclosed
them fate with the wave. Where ways ere lay sea raged. Their
might was merged, the streams stood, the storm rose high to
heaven ; the loudest army-cry the hostile uttered ; the air above
was thickened with dying voices. . . . Ocean raged, drew itself
up on high, the storms rose, the corpses rolled." l

Is the song of the Exodus more abrupt, more vehe-
ment, or more savage? These men can speak of the
creation like the Bible, because they speak of destruc-
tion like the Bible. They have only to look into their
own hearts, in order to discover an emotion sufficiently
strong to raise their souls to the height of their Creator.
This emotion existed already in their pagan legends ;
and Caedmon, in order to recount the origin of things,
has only to turn to the ancient dreams, such as have
been preserved in the prophecies of the Edda.

" There had not here 'as yet, save cavern-shade, aught been ;
but this wide abyss stood deep and dim, strange to its Lord, idle
and useless ; on which looked with his eyes the King firm of
mind, and beheld those places void of joys ; saw the dark cloud
lower in eternal night, swart under heaven, dark and waste,
until this worldly creation through the word existed of the Glory-
King. . . . The earth as yet was not green with grass ; ocean
cover'd, swart in eternal night, far and wide the dusky ways." *

In this manner will Milton hereafter speak, the
descendant of the Hebrew seers, last of the Scandi-
navian seers, but assisted in the development of his
thought by all the resources of Latin culture and

1 Thorpe, Ccedmon, 1832, xlvii. p. 206.

- Thorpe, Ccedmon, ii. p. 7. A likeness exists between this gong
and corresponding portions of the Edda.

CHAP. L THE SAXONS. 81

civilisation. And yet he will add nothing to the
primitive sentiment. Keligious instinct is not acquired ;
it belongs to the blood, and is inherited with it. So
it is with other instincts; pride in the first place,
indomitable self-conscious energy, which sets man in
opposition to all domination, and inures him against
all pain. Milton's Satan exists already in Caedmon's,
as the picture exists in the sketch ; because both have
their model in the race ; and Csedmon found his origi-
nals in the northern warriors, as Milton did in the
Puritans :

" Why shall I for his favour serve, bend to him in such
vassalage 1 I may be a god as he. Stand by me, strong associ-
ates, who will not fail me in the strife. Heroes stern of mood,
they have chosen me for chief, renowned warriors ! with such
may one devise counsel, with such capture his adherents ; they
are my zealous friends, faithful in their thoughts ; I may be
their chieftain, sway in this realm ; thus to me it seemeth not
right that I in aught need cringe to God for any good ; I will
no longer be his vassal." l

He is overcome : shall he be subdued ? He is cast
into the place "where torment they suffer, burning heat
intense, in midst of hell, fire and broad flames : so also
the bitter seeks smoke and darkness ; " will he repent ?
At first he is astonished, he despairs ; but it is a hero's
despair.

" This narrow place is most unlike that other that we ere
knew,2 high in heaven's kingdom, which my master bestow'd on
me. . . . Oh, had I power of my hands, and might one season

1 Thorpe, Ccedmon, iv. p. 1 8.

2 This is Milton's opening also. (See Paradise Lost, Book i. verse
242, etc.) One would think that he must have had some knowledge of
O.dmon from the translation of Juniu*

VOL. L G

82 THE SOURCE. BOOK i.

be without, be one winter's space, then with this host I — But
around me lie iron bonds, presseth this cord of chain : I am
powerless ! me have so hard the clasps of hell, so firmly grasped !
Here is a vast fire above and underneath, never did I see a loath-
lier landskip ; the flame abateth not, hot over hell. Me hath
the clasping of these rings, this hard-polish'd band, impeded in
my course, debarred me from my way ; my feet are bound, my
hands manacled, ... so that with aught I cannot from these
limb-bonds escape."1

As there is nothing to be done against God, it is
His new creature, man, whom he must attack. To
him who has lost everything, vengeance is left ; and if
the conquered can enjoy this, he will find himself
happy ; " he will sleep softly, even under his chains."

VII.

Here the foreign culture ceased. Beyond Christi-
anity it could not graft upon this barbarous stock any
fruitful or living branch. All the circumstances which
elsewhere mellowed the wild sap, failed here. The
Saxons found Britain abandoned by the Romans ; they
had not yielded, like their brothers on the Continent,
to the ascendency of a superior civilisation ; they had
not become mingled with the inhabitants of the land ;
they had always treated them like enemies or slaves,
pursuing like wolves those who escaped to the moun-
tains of the west, treating like beasts of burden those
whom they had conquered with the land. While the
Germans of Gaul, Italy, and Spain became Romans,
the Saxons retained their language, their genius and
manners, and created in Britain a Germany outside of
Germany. A hundred and fifty years after the Saxon

1 Thorpe, Ccedmon, iv. p. 23.

CHAP. L THE SAXON 8. 83

invasion, the introduction of Christianity and the dawn
of security attained by a society inclining to peace
gave birth to a kind of literature ; and we meet with
the venerable Bede, and later on, Alcuin, John Scotus
Erigena, and some others, commentators, translators,
teachers of barbarians, who tried not to originate but
to compile, to pick out and explain from the great Greek
and Latin encyclopaedia something which might suit
the men of their time. But the wars with the Danes
came and crushed this humble plant, which, if left to
itself, would have come to nothing.1 When -Alfred2
the Deliverer became king, "there were very few
ecclesiastics," he says, "on this side of the Humber,
who could understand in English their own Latin
prayers, or translate any Latin writing into English.
On the other side of the Humber I think there were
scarce any ; there were so few that, in truth, I cannot
remember a single man south of the Thames, when I
took the kingdom, who was capable of it." He tried,
like Charlemagne, to instruct his people, and turned
into Saxon for their use several works, above all some
moral books, as the de Consolatione of Boethius ; but
this very translation bears witness to the barbarism of
his audience. He adapts the text in order to bring it
down to their intelligence ; the pretty verses of Boethius,
somewhat pretentious, laboured, elegant, crowded with
classical allusions of a refined and compact style worthy

1 They themselves feel their impotence and decrepitude. Bede,
dividing the history of the world into six periods, says that the fifth,
^rhich stretches from the return out of Babylon to the birth of Christ,
is the senile period ; the sixth is the present, oetas decrepita, totius morU
*<xculi consummanda.

a Died in 901 ; Adhelm died 709, Bede died 735. Alcuin lived
under Charlemagne, Erigena under Charles the Bald (843-877).

84

THE SOURCE.

BOOK L

of Seneca, become an artless, long drawn out and yet
desultory prose, like a nurse's fairy tale, explaining
everything, recommencing and breaking off its phrases,
making ten turns about a single detail ; so low was it
necessary to stoop to the level of this new intelligence,
which had never thought or known anything. Here
follows the latin of Boethius, so affected, so pretty, with
the English translation affixed : —

" Quondam funera conjugis
Vates Threicius gemens,
Postquam flebilibus modis
Silvas currere, mobiles
Amnes stare coegerat,
Junxitque intrepidum latus
Saevis cerva leonibus,
Nee visum timuit lepus
Jam cantn placidum can em ;
Cum flagrantior intima
Fervor pectoris ureret,
Nee qui cuncta subegerant
Mulcerent dominum modi ;
Immites superos querens,
Infernas adiit domos.
Illic blanda sonantibus
Chordis carmiua temperans,
Quidquid praecipuis Deae
Matris fontibus hauserat,
Quod luctus dabat impotens,
Quod luctum geminaus amor,
Deflet Tartara commovens,
Et dulci veniam prece
Umbrarum dominos rogat.
Stupet tergeminus novo
Captus carmine janitor ;

" It happened formerly that
there was a harper in the country
called Thrace, which was in
Greece. The harper was incon-
ceivably good. His name was
Orpheus. He had a very excel-
lent wife, called Eurydice. Then
began men to say concerning .the
harper, that he could harp so that
the wood moved, and the stones
stirred themselves at the sound,
and wild beasts would run there-
to, and stand as if they were tame ;
so still, that though men or hounds
pursued them, they shunned them
not. Then said they, that the
harper's wife should die, and her
soul should bo led to hell. Then
should the harper become so sor-
rowful that he could not remain
among the men, but frequented
the wood, and sat on the moun-
tains, both day and night, weeping
and harping, so that the woods
shook, and the rivers stood still,
and no hart shunned any lion, nor

CHAP. J.

THE SAXONS.

85

Quae soutes agitant nietu
Ultrices scelerum Deae
Jam mcestae lacrymis madeiit.
Non Ixionium caput
Velox praecipitat rota,
Et longa site perditus
Spernit fluraina Tantalus.
Vultur dum satur est modis
Non traxit Tityi jecur.
Tandem, vincirnur, arbiter
Umbrarum miserans ait.
Donemus comitem viro,
Emptam carmine conjugem.
Sed lex dona coerceat,
Nee, dum Tartara liquerit,
Fas sit lumina flectere.
Quis legem det amantibus !
Major lex fit amor sibi.
Heu ! noctis prope terminos
Orpheus Eurydicem suam
Vidit, perdidit, occidit.
Vos haec fabula respicit,
Quicunque in superum diem
Mentem ducere quaeritis.

hare any hound ; nor did cattle
know any hatred, or any fear of
others, for the pleasure of the
sound. Then it seemed to the
harper that nothing in this world
pleased him. Then thought he
that he would seek the gods of
hell, and endeavour to allure them
with his harp, and pray that they
would give him back his wife.
When he came thither, then
should there come towards him
the dog of hell, whose name was
Cerberus, — he should have three
heads, — and began to wag his tail,
and play with him for his harping.
Then was there also a very hor-
rible gatekeeper, whose name
should be Charon. He had also
three heads, and he was very old.
Then began the harper to beseech
him that he would protect him
while he was there, and bring him
thence again safe. Then did ho
Nam qui tartareum in specus promise that to him, because he

Victus lumina flexerit,
Quidquid praecipuum trahit
Perdit, dum videt inferos."
Book m. Metre 12.

was desirous of the unaccustomed
sound. Then went he farther
until he met the fierce goddesses,
whom the common people call
Parcae, of whom they say, that

they know no respect for any man, but punish every man accord-
ing to his deeds ; and of whom they say, that they control every
man's fortune. Then began he to implore their mercy. Then
began they to weep with him. Then went he farther, and all
the inhabitants of hell ran towards him, and led him to theii

86 THE SOURCE. BOOK i.

king : and all began to speak with him, and to pray that which
he prayed. And the restless wheel which Ixion, the king of the
Lapithse, was bound to for his guilt, that stood still for his
harping. And Tantalus the king, who in this world was im-
moderately greedy, and whom that same vice of greediness
followed there, he became quiet. And the vulture should cease,
so that he tore not the liver of Tityus the king, which before
therewith tormented him. And all the punishments of the
inhabitants of hell were suspended, whilst he harped before the
king. When he long and long had harped, then spoke the king
of the inhabitants of hell, and said, Let us give the man his
wife, for he has earned her by his harping. He then commanded
him that he should well observe that, he never looked bachvards
after he departed thence ; and said, if he looked backwards, that
he should lose the woman. But men can with great difficulty,
if at all, restrain love ! Wellaway ! What ! Orpheus then
led his wife with him till he came to the boundary of light and
darkness. Then went his wife after him. When he came forth
into the light, then looked he behind his back towards the
woman. Then was she immediately lost to him. This fable
teaches every man who desires to fly the darkness of hell, and
to come to the light of the true good, that he look not about
him to his old vices, so that he practise them again as fully as
he did before. For whosoever with full will turns his mind to
the vices which he had before forsaken, and practises them, and
they then fully please him, and he never thinks of forsaking
them ; then loses he all his former good unless he again amend
it."1

A man speaks thus when he wishes to impress upon
the mind of his hearers an idea which is not clear to
them. Boethius had for his audience senators, men of
culture, who understood as well as we the slightest
mythological allusion. Alfred is obliged to take them

1 Fox's Alfred's Boeihiu*, chap. 35, § 6, 1864.

CHAP. i. THE SAXONS. 87

up and develop them, like a father or a master, who
draws his little boy between his knees, and relates to
him names, qualities, crimes and their punishments,
which the Latin only hints at. But the ignorance is
such that the teacher himself needs correction. He
takes the Parcae for the Erinyes, and gives Charon
three heads like Cerberus. There is no adornment in
his version ; no delicacy as in the original. Alfred has
hard work to make himself understood. What, for
instance, becomes of the noble Platonic moral, the apt
interpretation after the style of lamblichus and Por-
phyry? It is altogether dulled. He has to call
everything by its name, and turn the eyes of his people
to tangible and visible things. It is a sermon suited
to his audience of Thanes ; the Danes whom he had
converted by the sword needed a clear moral. If he
had translated for them exactly the last words of Boe-
thius, they would have opened wide their big stupid
eyes and fallen asleep.

For the whole talent of an uncultivated mind lies in
the force and oneness of its sensations. Beyond that it
is powerless. The art of thinking and reasoning lies
above it. These men lost all genius when they lost their
fever-heat. They lisped awkwardly and heavily dry
chronicles, a sort of historical almanacks. You might
think them peasants, who, returning from their toil, came
and scribbled with chalk on a smoky table the date of a
year of scarcity, the price of corn, the changes in the
weather, a death. Even so, side by side with the meagre
Bible chronicles, which set down the successions of kings,
and of Jewish massacres, are exhibited the exaltation of
the psalms and the transports of prophecy. The same
lyric poet can be alternately a brute and a genius, because

88 THE SOURCE. BOOK i

his genius comes and goes like a disease, and instead of
having it he simply is ruled by it.

" A. D. 611. This year Cynegils succeeded to the government
in Wessex, and held it one-and-thirty winters. Cynegils was
the son of Ceol, Ceol of Cutha, Cutha of Cynric.

"614. This year Cynegils and Cnichelm fought at Bampton,
and slew two thousand and forty-six of the Welsh.

"678. This year appeared the comet-star in August, and
shone every morning during three months like a sunbeam.
Bishop Wilfrid being driven from his bishopric by King Everth,
two bishops were consecrated in his stead.

" 901. This year died Alfred, the son of Ethelwulf, six nights
before the mass of All Saints. He was king over all the English
nation, except that part that was under the power of the Danes.
He held the government one year and a half less than thirty
winters ; and then Edward his son took to the government.

" 902. This year there was the great fight at the Holme,
between the men of Kent and the Danes.

" 1077. This year were reconciled the King of the Franks,
and William, King of England. But it continued only a little
while. This year was London burned, one night before the
Assumption of St. Mary, so terribly as it never was before since
it was built."1

It is thus the poor monks speak, with monotonous
dryness, who after Alfred's time gather up and take note
of great visible events ; sparsely scattered we find a few
moral reflections, a passionate emotion, nothing more.
In the tenth century we see King Edgar give a manor
to a bishop, on condition that he will put into Saxon
the monastic regulation written in Latin by Saint Bene-
dict Alfred himself was almost the last man of culture ;
he, like Charlemagne, became so only by dint of deter-

1 All these extracts are taken from Ingram's Saxon Chronicle, 1823.

CHAP. i. THE SAXONS. 89

mination and patience. In vain the great spirits of this
age endeavour to link themselves to the relics of the fine,
ancient civilisation, and to raise themselves above the
chaotic and muddy ignorance in which the others
flounder. They rise almost alone, and on their death
the rest sink again into the mire. It is the human
beast that remains master ; the mind cannot find a place
amidst the outbursts and the desires of the flesh, gluttony
and brute force. Even in the little circle where he
moves, his labour comes to nought. The model which
he proposed to himself oppresses and enchains him in a
cramping imitation ; he aspires but to be a good copyist ;
he produces a gathering of centos which he calls Latin
verses ; he applies himself to the discovery of expres-
sions, sanctioned by good models ; he succeeds only in
elaborating an emphatic, spoiled Latin, bristling with
incongruities. In place of ideas, the most profound
amongst them serve up the defunct doctrines of de-
funct authors. They compile religious manuals and
philosophical manuals from the Fathers. Erigena, the
most learned, goes to the extent of reproducing the old
complicated dreams of Alexandrian metaphysics. How
far these speculations and reminiscences soar above the
barbarous crowd which howls and bustles in the depths
below, no words can express. There was a certain king
of Kent in the seventh century who could not write.
Imagine bachelors of theology discussing before an audi-
ence of waggoners, not Parisian waggoners, but such as
survive in Auvergne or in the Vosges. Among these
clerks, who think like studious scholars in accordance
with their favourite authors, and are doubly separated
from the world as scholars and monks, Alfred alone, by
Ms position as a layman and a practical man, descends in

90 THE SOUKCE. BOOK i.

his Saxon% translations and his Saxon verses to the com-
mon level ; and we have seen that his effort, like that of
Charlemagne, was fruitless. There was an impassable
wall between the old learned literature and the present
chaotic barbarism. Incapable, yet compelled, to fit into
the ancient mould, they gave it a twist. Unable to
reproduce ideas, they reproduced a metre. They tried to
eclipse their rivals in versification by the refinement oi
their composition, and the prestige of a difficulty over-
come. So, in our own colleges, the good scholars imitate
the clever divisions and symmetry of Claudian rather
than the ease and variety of Virgil. They put their feet
in irons, and showed their smartness by running in
shackles ; they weighted themselves with rules of modern
rhyme and rules of ancient metre ; they added the neces-
sity of beginning each verse with the same letter that
began the last. A few, like Adhelm, wrote square
acrostics, in which the first line, repeated at the end,
was found also to the left and right of the piece. Thus
made up of the first and last letters of each verse, it
forms a border to the whole piece, and the morsel of
verse is like a piece of tapestry. Strange literary tricks,
which changed the poet into an artisan. They bear
witness to the difficulties which then impeded culture
and nature, and spoiled at once the Latin form and the
Saxon genius.

Beyond this barrier, which drew an impassable line
between civilisation and barbarism, there was another,
no less impassable, between the Latin and Saxon genius.
The strong German imagination, in which glowing and
obscure visions suddenly meet and abruptly overflow, was
in contrast with the reasoning spirit, in which ideas
gather and are developed only in a regular order; so

CHAP. i. THE SAXONS. 91

that if the barbarian, in his classical attempts, retained
any part of his primitive instincts, he succeeded only in
producing a grotesque and frightful monster. One of
them this very Adhelm, a relative of King Ina, who sang
on the town-bridge profane and sacred hymns alternately,
too much imbued with Saxon poesy, simply to imitate
the antique models, adorned his Latin prose and verse
with all the "English magnificence."1 You might com-
pare him to a barbarian who seizes a flute from the
skilled hands of a player of Augustus' court, in order to
blow on it with inflated lungs, as if it were the bellow-
ing horn of an aurochs. The sober speech of the Eoman
orators and senators becomes in his hands full of exag-
gerated and incoherent images; he violently connects
words, uniting them in a sudden and extravagant
manner; he heaps up his colours, and utters extra-
ordinary and unintelligible nonsense, like that of the
later Skalds ; in short, he is a latinised Skald, dragging
into his new tongue the ornaments of Scandinavian
poetry, such as alliteration, by dint of which he con-
gregates in one of his epistles fifteen consecutive words,
all beginning with the same letter; and in order to
make up his fifteen, he introduces a barbarous Graecism
amongst the Latin words.2 Amongst the others, the
writers of legends, you will meet many times with
deformation of Latin, distorted by the outburst of a too
vivid imagination ; it breaks out even in their scholastic
and scientific writing. Here is part of a dialogue be-
tween Alcuin and prince Pepin, a son of Charlemagne,

1 William of Maliuesbury's expression.

3 Primitus (pantorum procerum praetorumque pio potissimura pater-
noque praesertim privilegio) panegyricum poemataque .passim prosatori
sub polo promulgantes, stridula vocum symphonia ac melodiw caudle,
nseqne carmine modulaturi hymnizemus.

92 THE SOURCE. BOOK i.

and he uses like formulas the little poetic aud bold
phrases which abound in the national poetry. "What
is winter ? the banishment of summer. What is spring ?
the painter of the earth. What is the year ? the world's
chariot. What is the sun ? the splendour of the world,
the beauty of heaven, the grace of nature, the honour of
day, the distributor of the hours. What is the sea ?
the path of audacity, the boundary of the earth, the re-
ceptacle of the rivers, the fountain of showers." More,
he ends his instructions with enigmas, in the spirit of
the Skalds, such as we still find in the old manuscripts
with the barbarian songs. It was the last feature of the
national genius, which, when it labours to understand a
matter, neglects dry, clear, consecutive deduction, to em-
ploy grotesque, remote, oft repeated imagery, and replaces
analysis by intuition.

VIII.

Such was this race, the last born of the sister races,
which, in the decay of the other two, the Latin and the
Greek, brings to the world a new civilisation, with a
new character and genius. Inferior to these in many
respects, it surpasses them in not a few. Amidst the
woods and mire and snows, under a sad, inclement sky,
gross instincts have gained the day during this long
barbarism. The German has not acquired gay hum-
our, unreserved facility, the feeling for harmonious
beauty ; his great phlegmatic body continues savage
and stiff, greedy and brutal; his rude and unpliable
mind is still inclined to savagery, and restive under
culture. Dull and congealed, his ideas cannot expand
with facility and freedom, with a natural sequence and
an instinctive regularity. But this spirit, void of the

CHAP. L THE SAXONS. 93

sentiment of the beautiful, is all the more apt for the
sentiment of the true. The deep and incisive impression
which he receives from contact with objects, and which
as yet he can only express by a cry, will afterwards
liberate him from the Latin rhetoric, and will vent itself
on things rather than on words. Moreover, under the
constraint of climate and solitude, by the habit of resist-
ance and effort, his ideal is changed. Manly and moral
instincts have gained the empire over him ; and amongst
them the need of independence, the disposition for serious
and strict manners, the inclination for devotion and
veneration, the worship of heroism. Here are the
foundations and the elements of a civilisation, slower
but sounder, less careful of what is agreeable and elegant,
more based on justice and truth.1 Hitherto at least the
race is intact, intact in its primitive coarseness ; the
Roman cultivation could neither develop nor deform
it. If Christianity took root, it was owing to natural
affinities, but it produced no change in the native
genius. Now approaches a new conquest, which is to
bring this time men, as well as ideas. The Saxons,
meanwhile, after the wont of German races, vigorous
and fertile, have within the past six centuries multiplied
enormously. They were now about two millions, and
the Norman army numbered sixty thousand.2 In vain

1 ID Iceland, the country of the fiercest sea-kings, crimes are un-
known ; prisons have been turned to other nses ; fines are the only
punishment.

2 Following Doomsday Book, Mr. Turner reckons at three hundred
thousand the heads of families mentioned. If each family consisted of
five persons, that would make one million five hundred thousand people.
He adds five hundred thousand for the four northern counties, for
London and several large towns, for the monks and provincial clergy
not enumerated. . . . We must accept these figures with caution. StilJ

94 THE SOURCE. BOOK i,

these Normans become transformed, gallicised ; by theii
origin, and substantially in -themselves they are still the
relatives of those whom they conquered. In vain they
imported their manners and their poesy, and introduced
into the language a third part of its words ; this lan-
guage continues altogether German in element and in
substance.1 Though the grammar changed, it changed
integrally, by an internal action, in the same sense as
its continental cognates. At the end of three hundred
years the conquerors themselves were conquered ; their
.speech became English ; and owing to frequent inter-
marriage, the English blood ended by gaining the pre-
dominance over the Norman blood in their veins. The
race finally remains Saxon. If the old poetic genius
disappears after the Conquest, it is as a river disappears
and flows for a while underground. In five centuries
it will emerge once more.1

they agree with those of Mackintosh, George Chalmers, and several
others. Many facts show that the Saxon population was very numerous,
and quite out of proportion to the Norman population.

3 Warton, History of English Poetry, 1840, 3 vols. preface.

CHAP. ii. THE NORMANS.

CHAPTER II.

I.

A CENTURY ana a half had passed on the Continent
since, amid the universal decay and dissolution, a new
society had been formed, and new men had risen up.
Brave men had at length made a stand against the
Norsemen and the robhers. They had planted their
feet in the soil, and the moving chaos of the general
subsidence had become fixed by the effort of their great
hearts and of their arms. At the mouths of the rivers,
in the defiles of the mountains, on the margin of the
waste borders, at all perilous passes, they had built their
forts, each for himself, each on his own land, each with
his faithful band; and they had lived like a scattered
but watchful army, encamped and confederate in their
castles, sword in hand, in front of the enemy. Beneath
this discipline a formidable people had been formed,
fierce hearts in strong bodies,1 intolerant of restraint,

1 See, amidst other delineations of their manners, the first accounts
of the first Cmsade. Godfrey clove a Saracen down to his waist. — In
Palestine, a widow was compelled, up to the age of sixty, to marry again,
because no fief could remain without a defender. — A Spanish leader said
to his exhausted soldiers after a battle, " You are too weary and too
much wounded, but come and fight with me against this other band ;
the fresh wounds which we shall receive will make us forget those which
we have. " At this time, says the General Chronicle of Spain, kings
counts, and nobles, 'end all the knights, that they might be ever ready
kept their horses in the chamber where they slept with their wives.

96 THE SOUKCE. BOOK i.

longing for violent deeds, born for constant warfare
because steeped in permanent warfare, heroes and rob-
bers, who, as an escape from their solitude, plunged
into adventures, and went, that they might conquei
a country or win Paradise, to Sicily, to Portugal, to
Spain> to Livonia, to Palestine, to England.

II.

On the 2 7th of September 1066, at the mouth of the
Somme, there was a great sight to be seen : four
hundred large sailing vessels, more than a thousand
transports, and sixty thousand men, were on the point
of embarking.1 The sun shone splendidly after long
rain ; trumpets sounded, the cries of this armed mul-
titude rose to heaven ; as far as the eye could see, on
the shore, in the wide-spreading river on the sea which
opens out thence broad and shining, masts and sails
extended like a forest; the enormous fleet set out
wafted by the south wind.2 The people which it
carried were said to have come from Norway, and they
might have been taken for kinsmen of the Saxons, with
whom they were to fight; but there were with them
a multitude of adventurers, crowding from all quarters,
far and near, from north and south, from Maine and
Anjou, from Poitou and Brittany, from Ile-de-France
and Flanders, from Aquitaine and Burgundy ; 3 and, in
short, the expedition itself was French.

1 For difference in numbers of the fleet and men, see Freeman, Hist,
of the Norm. Conq., 3 vols. 1867, iii. 381, 387.— TR.

a For all the details, see Anglo-Norman Chronicles, iii. 4, as quoted
by Aug. Thierry. I have myself seen the locality and the country.

3 Of three columns of attack at Hastings, two were composed of
auxiliaries. Moreover, the chroniclers are not at fault upon this critical
point ; they agree in stating that England was conquered by French-
raeu.

CHAP. ii. THE NORMANS. 97

How comes it that, having kept its name, it had
changed its nature? and what series of renovations
had made a Latin out of a German people ? The
reason is that this people, when they came to Neustria,
were neither a national body, nor a pure race. They
were but a band ; and as such, marrying the women of
the country, they introduced foreign blood into their
children. They were a Scandinavian band, but swelled
by all the bold knaves and all the wretched desperadoes
who wandered about the conquered country:1 and as
such they received foreign blood into their veins.
Moreover, if the nomadic band was mixed, the settled
band was much more so ; and peace by its transfusions,
like war by its recruits, had changed the character of
the primitive blood. When Eollo, having divided the
land amongst his followers, hung the thieves and their
abettors, people from every country gathered to him.
Security, good stern justice, were so rare, that they
were enough to re-people a land.2 He invited strangers,
say the old writers, "and made one people out of so
many folk of different natures." This assemblage of
barbarians, refugees, robbers, immigrants, spoke Komance
or French so quickly, that the second Duke, wishing to
have his son taught Danish, had to send him to Bayeux,
where it was still spoken. The great masses always
form the race in the end, and generally the genius and
language. Thus this people, so transformed, quickly
became polished ; the composite race showed itself of a

1 It was a Rouen fisherman, a soldier of Rollo, who killed the Duke
of France at the mouth of the Eure. Hastings, the famous sea-king,
was a labourer's son from the neighbourhood of Troyes.

2 " In the tenth century," says Stendhal, "a man wished for two
things : 1st, not to be slain ; 2dy to have a good leather coat." See
Fontenelle's Chronicle.

VOL. I. H

98 THE SOURCE. BOOK i.

ready genius, far more wary than the Saxons across the
Channel, closely resembling their neighbours of Picardy,
Champagne, and Ile-de-France. "The Saxons," says
an old writer,1 " vied with each other in their drinking
feats, and wasted their income by day and night in feast-
ing, whilst they lived in wretched hovels ; the French
and Normans, on the other hand, living inexpensively
in their fine large houses, were besides refined in their
food and studiously careful in their dress." The former,
still weighted by the German phlegm, were gluttons
and drunkards, now and then aroused by poetical en-
thusiasm; the latter, made sprightlier by their trans-
plantation and their alloy, felt the cravings of the mind
already making themselves manifest. " You might see
amongst them churches in every village, and monas-
teries in the cities, towering on high, and built in a
style unknown before," first in Normandy, and later in
England.2 Taste had come to them at once — that is,
the desire to please the eye, and to express a thought
by outward representation, which was quite a new idea :
the circular arch was raised on one or on a cluster of
columns; elegant mouldings were placed about the
windows ; the rose window made its appearance, simple
yet, like the flower which gives it its name "rose des
Iwissons ;" and the Norman style unfolded itself, original
yet proportioned between the Gothic, whose richness it
foreshadowed, and the Eomance, whose solidity it recalled.
With taste, just as natural and just as quickly, was
developed the spirit of inquiry. Nations are like

1 William of Malmesbury.

2 Churches in London, Sarum, Norwich, Durham, Chichester, Peter-
borough, Rochester, Hereford, Gloucester, Oxford, etc. — William oi
Malmesbury.

CHAP. n. THE NORMANS. 99

children; with some the tongue is readily loosened,
and they comprehend at once ; with others it is loosened
with difficulty, and they are slow of comprehension.
The men we are here speaking of had educated them-
selves nimbly, as Frenchmen do. They were the first
in France who unravelled the language, regulating it
and writing it so well, that to this day we understand
their codes and their poems. In a century and a half
they were so far cultivated as to find the Saxons
"unlettered and rude."1 That was the excuse they
made for banishing them from the abbeys and all
valuable ecclesiastical offices. And, in fact, this excuse
was rational, for they instinctively hated gross stupidity.
Between the Conquest and the death of King John,
they established five hundred and fifty-seven schools
in England. Henry Beauclerk, son of the Conqueror,
was trained in the sciences ; so were Henry II. and his
three sons : Richard, the eldest of these, was a poet.
Lanfranc, first Norman Archbishop of Canterbury, a
subtle logician, ably argued the Real Presence ; Anselm,
his successor, the first thinker of the age, thought he
had discovered a new proof of the existence of God,
and tried to make religion philosophical by adopting as
his maxim, " Crede ut intelligas." The notion was
doubtless grand, especially in the eleventh century;
and they could not have gone more promptly to work.
Of course the science I speak of was but scholastic,
and these terrible folios slay more understandings than
they confirm. But people must begin as they can ;
and syllogism, even in Latin, even in theology, is yet
an exercise of the mind and a proof of the understand-
ing. Among the continental priests who settled in

1 Ordericus Vitalia

100 THE SOURCE. BOOK L

England, one established a library; another, founder
of a school, made the scholars perform the play of Saint
Catherine ; a third wrote in polished Latin, " epigrams
as pointed as those of Martial." Such were the
recreations of an intelligent race, eager for ideas, of
ready and flexible genius, whose clear thought was not
clouded, like that of the Saxon brain, by drunken
hallucinations, and the vapours of a greedy and well-
filled stomach. They loved conversations, tales of
adventure. Side by side with their Latin chroniclersv
Henry of Huntingdon, William of Malmesbury, thought-
ful men already, who could not only relate, but criticise
here and there, there were rhyming chronicles in the
vulgar tongue, as those of Geoffrey Gaimar, Be"nott de
Sainte-Maure, Robert Wace. Do not imagine that
their verse-writers were sterile of words or lacking in
details. They were talkers, tale-tellers, speakers above
all, ready of tongue, and never stinted in speech. Not
singers by any means ; they speak — this is their strong
point, in their poems as in their chronicles. They
were the earliest who wrote the Song of Roland ; upon
this they accumulated a multitude of songs concerning
Charlemagne and his peers, concerning Arthur and
Merlin, the Greeks and Eomans, King Horn, Guy of
Warwick, every prince and every people. Their
minstrels (trouv&res), like their knights, draw in abund-
ance from Welsh, Franks, and Latins, and descend upon
East and West, in the wide field of adventure. They
address themselves to a spirit of inquiry, as the Saxons
to enthusiasm, and dilute in their long, clear, and
flowing narratives the lively colours of German and
Breton traditions ; battles, surprises, single combats,
embassies, speeches, processions, ceremonies, huntings,

CHAP. ii. THE NORMANS. 101

a variety of amusing events, employ their ready and
wandering imaginations. At first, in the Song of
Roland, it is still kept in check; it walks with long
strides, but only walks. Presently its wings have
grown; incidents are multiplied; giants and monsters
abound, the natural disappears, the song of the jongleur
grows a poem under the hands of the trouvbre ; he
would speak, like Nestor of old, five, even six years
running, and not grow tired or stop. Forty thousand
verses are not too much to satisfy their gabble ; a facile
mind, copious, inquisitive, descriptive, such is the
genius of the race. The Gauls, their fathers, used to
delay travellers on the road to make them tell their
stories, and boasted, like these, "of fighting well and
talking with ease."

With chivalric poetry, they are not wanting in
chivalry; principally, it may be, because they are
strong, and a strong man loves to prove his strength
by knocking down his neighbours ; but also from a
desire of fame, and as a point of honour. By this one
word honour the whole spirit of warfare is changed.
Saxon poets painted war as a murderous fury, as
a blind madness which shook flesh and blood, and
awakened the instincts of the beast of prey ; Norman
poets describe it as a tourney. The new passion which
they introduce is that of vanity and gallantry ; Guy of
Warwick dismounts all the knights in Europe, in order
to deserve the hand of the prude and scornful Felice.
The tourney itself is but a ceremony, somewhat brutal
I admit, since it turns upon the breaking of arms and
limbs, but yet brilliant and French. To show skill
and courage, display the magnificence of dress and
armour, be applauded by and please the ladies, — such

102 THE SOURCE. BOOK i.

feelings indicate men of greater sociality, more under
the influence of public opinion, less the slaves of their
own passions, void both of lyric inspiration and savage
enthusiasm, gifted by a different genius, because in-
clined to other pleasures.

Such were the men who at this moment were dis-
embarking in England to introduce their new manners
and a new spirit, French at bottom, in mind and speech,
though with special and provincial features ; of all the
most matter-of-fact, with an eye to the main chance,
calculating, having the nerve and the dash of our own
soldiers, but with the tricks and precautions of lawyers ,
heroic undertakers of profitable enterprises; having
gone to Sicily and Naples, and ready to travel to Con-
stantinople or Antioch, so it be to take a country or
bring back money; subtle politicians, accustomed in
Sicily to hire themselves to the highest bidder, and
capable of doing a stroke of business in the heat of the
Crusade, like Bohe"mond, who, before Antioch, specu-
lated on the dearth of his Christian allies, and would
only open the town to them under condition of their
keeping it for himself; methodical and persevering
conquerors, expert in administration, and fond of scrib-
bling on paper, like this very William, who was able
to organise such an expedition, and such an army, and
kept a written roll of the same, and who proceeded to
register the whole of England in his Domesday Book.
Sixteen days after the disembarkation, the contrast
between the two nations was manifested at Hastings
by its visible effects.

The Saxons "ate and drank the whole night. You
might have seen them struggling much, and leaping and

CHAP. ii. THE NORMANS. 103

singing," with shouts of laughter and noisy joy.1 In the
morning they packed behind their palisades the dense
masses of their heavy infantry, and with battle-axe hung
round their neck awaited the attack. The wary Normans
weighed the chances of heaven and hell, and tried to
enlist God upon their side. Eobert Wace, their his-
torian and compatriot, is no more troubled by poetical
imagination than they were by warlike inspiration ; and
on the eve of the battle his mind is as prosaic and clear
as theirs.2 The same spirit showed itself in the battle.
They were for the most part bowmen and horsemen, well-
skilled, nimble, and clever. Taillefer, the jongleur, who
asked for the honour of striking the first blow, went
singing, like a true French volunteer, performing tricks
all the while.3 Having arrived before the English, he

1 Robert Wace, Roman du Rou.
Ibid.

Et li Normanz et li Franceiz Unt Normanz a pramis e voe,

Tote nuit firent oreisons, Si com li cler 1'orent loe,

Et furent en aflicions. Ke a ce jor mez s'il veskeient,

De lor pechies confez se firent Char ni saunc ne mangereient

As proveires les regehirent, , Giifrei, eveske de Constances,

Et qui n'en out proveires prez, A plusors joint lor penitances.

A son veizin se fist confez, Cli rec,ut li confessions

Pour 90 ke samedi esteit Et dona li be"neicons.
Ke la bataille estre debveit.

3 Robert "Wace, Roman du Rou :

Taillefer ki moult bien cantout Tut mon servise me debvez,

Sur un roussin qui tot alout Hui, si vos plaist, me le rendez

Devant li dus alout cantant For tout guerredun vos requier,

De Kalermaine e de Rolant, Et si vos voil fonnent preier,

E d'Oliver et des vassals Otreiez-mei, ke jo n'i faille,

Ki moururent a Roncevals. Li primier colp de la bataille."

Quant Us orent chevalchie taut Et li dus repont : " Je 1'otrei.

K'as Engleis vindrent aprismant Et Taillefer point a desrei ;

" Sires ! dist Taillefer, merci ! Devant toz li altres se mist,

Je voa ai languement servi. Un Englez feri, si 1'ocist

104 THE SOURCE BOOK i.

cast his lance three times in the air, then his sword, and
caught them again by the handle ; and Harold's clumsy
foot-soldiers, who only knew how to cleave coats of mail
by blows from their battle-axes, "were astonished, saying
to one another that it was magic." As for William,
amongst a score of prudent and cunning actions, he per-
formed two well-calculated ones, which, in this sore em-
barrassment, brought him safe out of Ms difficulties.
He ordered his archers to shoot into the air ; the arrows
wounded many of the Saxons in the face, and one of
them pierced Harold in the eye, After this he simu-
lated flight ; the Saxons, intoxicated with joy and wrath,
quitted their entrenchments, and exposed themselves to
the lances of his horsemen. During the remainder of
the contest they only make a stand by small companies,
fight with fury, and end by being slaughtered. The
strong, mettlesome, brutal race threw themselves on the
enemy like a savage bull ; the dexterous Norman hunt-
ers wounded them adroitly, knocked them down, and
placed them under the yoke.

nf.

What then is this French race, which by arms and
letters makes such a splendid entrance upon the world,
and is so manifestly destined to rule, that in the East,
for example, their name of Franks will be given to all
the nations of the West ? Wherein consists this new
spirit, this precocious pioneer, this key of all middle-
age civilisation ? There is in every mind of the kind

De sos le pis, parmie la pance, Poiz a crie : " Venez, venez !

Li fist passer ultre la lance, Ke fetes -vos ? Ferez, ferez ! "

A terre estendu 1'abati. Done 1'unt Englez avirone,

Poi/ trait 1'espee, altre feri. Al secund colp k'il ou done.

CHAP. n. THE NORMANS. 105

a fundamental activity which, when incessantly repeated,
moulds its plan, and gives it its direction ; in town or
country, cultivated or not, in its infancy and its age, it
spends its existence and employs its energy in conceiv-
ing an event or an object. This is its original and per-
petual process ; and whether it change its region, return,
advance, prolong, or alter its course, its whole motion
is but a series of consecutive steps ; so that the least
alteration in the size, quickness, or precision of its
primitive stride transforms and regulates the whole
course, as in a tree the structure of the first shoot
determines the whole foliage, and governs the whole
growth.1 When the Frenchman conceives an event
or an object, he conceives quickly and distinctly ; there
is no internal disturbance, no previous fermentation of
confused and violent ideas, which, becoming concentrated
and elaborated, end in a noisy outbreak. The movement
of his intelligence is nimble and prompt like that of his
limbs ; at once and without effort he seizes upon his idea.
But he seizes that alone ; he leaves on one side all the
long entangling offshoots whereby it is entwined and
twisted amongst its neighbouring ideas; he does not
embarrass himself with nor think of them ; he detaches,
plucks, touches but slightly, and that is all. He is
deprived, or if you prefer it, he is exempt from those
sudden half-visions which disturb a man, and open up
to him instantaneously vast deeps and far perspectives.
Images are excited by internal commotion ; he, not being
so moved, imagines not. He is only moved superficially ;
he is without large sympathy ; he does not perceive an
object as it is, complex and combined, but in parts, with

1 The idea of types is applicable throughout all physical and moraJ
nature.

106 THE SOURCE. BOOK i.

a discursive and superficial knowledge. That is why
no race in Europe is less poetical. Let us look at their
epics ; none are more prosaic. They are not wanting
in number : The Song of Roland, Garin le Lolicrain,
Ogier le Danois? Berthe aux grands Pieds. There is a
library of them. Though their manners are heroic and
their spirit fresh, though they have originality, and
deal with grand events, yet, spite of this, the narrative
is as dull as that of the babbling Norinan chroniclers.
Doubtless when Homer relates he is as clear as they
are, and he develops as they do : but his magnificent
titles of rosy-fingered Morn, the wide-bosomed Air, the
divine and nourishing Earth, the earth-shaking Ocean,
come in every instant and expand their purple bloom
over the speeches and battles, and the grand abounding
similes which interrupt the narrative tell of a people more
inclined to enjoy beauty than to proceed straight to fact.
But here we have facts, always facts, nothing but facts ;
the Frenchman wants to know if the hero will kill the
traitor, the lover wed the maiden ; he must not be delayed
by poetry or painting. He advances nimbly to the end
of the story, not lingering for dreams of the heart or
wealth of landscape. There is no splendour, no colour,
in his narrative; his style is quite bare, and without
figures ; you may read ten thousand verses in these old
poems without meeting one. Shall we open the most
ancient, the most original, the most eloquent, at the
most moving point, the Song of Roland, when Roland is
dying ? The narrator is moved, and yet his language
remains the same, smooth, accentless', so penetrated by
the prosaic spirit, and so void of the poetic ! He gives
an abstract of motives, a summary of events, a series

1 Danois is a contraction of le d'Ardennois, from the Ardennes. — Ta.

CHA*. ii. THE NORMANS. 107

of causes for grief, a series of causes for consolation.1
Nothing more. These men regard the circumstance or
the action by itself, and adhere to this view. Their
idea remains exact, clear, and simple, and does not raise
up a similar image to be confused with the first, to
colour or transform itself. It remains dry ; they conceive

1 Genin, Chanson de Roland :

Co sent Rollans que la inort le trespent,
Devers la teste sur le quer li descent ;
Desuz un pin i est alet curant,
. Sur 1'herbe verte si est culchet adenz ;
Desuz lui met 1'espee et Folifan ;
Turnat sa teste vers la paiene gent,
Pour 90 1'at fait que il voelt veirement
Que Carles diet e trestute sa gent,
Li gentilz quens, qu'il fut mort cunqu^rant.
Cleimet sa culpe, e menut e suvent,
Pur ses pecchez en puroffrid lo guant.

Li quens Rollans se jut desuz un pin,
Envers Espaigne en ad turnet sun vis,
De plusurs choses a remembrer le prist.
De tantes terres cume li bers cunquist,
De dulce France, des humes de sun lign,
De Carlemagne sun seignor ki 1'nurrit.
Ne poet muer n'en plurt et ne susprit.
Mais lui meisme ne volt mettre en ubli.
Cleimet sa culpe, si priet Dieu mercit :

" Veire paterne, ki unques ne mentis,
Seint Lazaron de mort resurrexis,
Et Daniel des lions guaresis,
Guaris de mei 1'arome de tuz perilz,
Pur les pecchez que en ma vie fis. "
Sun destre guant a Deu en puroffrit.
Seint Gabriel de sa main 1'ad pris.
Desur sun bras teneit le chef enclin,
Juntes ses mains est alet a sa fin.
Deus i tramist sun angle cherubin,
Et seint Michel qu'on cleimet del peril
' Ensemble ad els seint Gabriel i vint,
I/anme del cunte portent en pareis.

108 THE SOURCE. BOOK i.

the divisions of the object one by one, without ever
collecting them, as the Saxons would, in an abrupt im-
passioned, glowing semi- vision. Nothing is more opposed
to their genius than the genuine songs and profound
hymns, such as the English monks were singing beneath
the low vaults of their churches. They would be dis-
concerted by the unevenness and obscurity of such lan-
guage. They are not capable of such an access of
enthusiasm and such excess of emotion. They never
cry out, they speak, or rather they converse, and that at
moments when the soul, overwhelmed by its 'trouble
might be expected to cease thinking and feeling. Thus
Amis, in a mystery-play, being leprous, calmly requires
his friend Amille to slay his two sons, in order that their
blood may heal him of his leprosy ; and Amille replies
still more calmly,1 If ever they try to sing, even in
heaven, "a roundelay high and clear," they will produce
little rhymed arguments, as dull as the dullest talk.3

1 Mon tres-chier ami debonnaire,
Vous m'avez une chose ditte
Qui n'est pas a faire petite
Mais que Ton doit moult resongnier.
Et nonpourquant, sanz eslongnier,
Puisque garison autrement
Ne povez avoir vraiement,
Pour vostre amour les occiray
Et le sang vous apporteray.
Vraiz Diex, moult est excellente,
Et de grant charite plaine,
Vostre bonte souveraine.
Car vostre grS.ce presente,
A toute personne humaine,
Vraix Diex, moult est excellente,
Pnisqu'elle a cuer et entente,
Et que a ce desir 1'amaine
Que de vous servir se paine.

CHAP. ii. THE NORMANS. 109

Pursue this literature to its conclusion ; regard it, like
that of the Skalds, at the time of its decadence, when
its vices, being exaggerated, display, like those of the
Skalds, only still more strongly the kind of mind which
produced it. The Skalds fall off into nonsense ; it loses
itself into babble and platitude. The Saxon could not
master his craving for exaltation ; the Frenchman could
not restrain the volubility of his tongue. He is too diffuse
and too clear ; the Saxon is too obscure and- brief. The
one was excessively agitated and carried away ; the other
explains and develops without measure. From the
twelfth century the Gestes spun out degenerate into
rhapsodies and psalmodies of thirty or forty thousand
verses. Theology enters into them ; poetry becomes an
interminable, intolerable litany, where the ideas, ex-
pounded, developed, and repeated ad inftnitum, without
one outburst of emotion or one touch of originality, flow
like a clear and insipid stream, and send off their reader,
by dint of their monotonous rhymes, into a comfortable
slumber. What a deplorable abundance of distinct and
facile ideas ! We meet with it again in the seventeenth
century, in the literary gossip which took place at the
feet of men of distinction ; it is the fault and the talent
of the race. With this involuntary art of perceiving,
and isolating instantaneously and clearly each part of
every object, people can speak, even for speaking's sake,
and for ever.

Such is the primitive process; how will it be con-
tinued ? Here appears a new trait in the French genius,
the most valuable of all. It is necessary to compre-
hension that the second idea shall be contiguous to the
first ; otherwise that genius is thrown out of its course
and arrested; it cannot proceed by irregular bounds;

110 THE SOURCE. BOOK i.

it must walk step by step, on a straight road ; order is
innate in it; without study, and in the first place, it
disjoints and decomposes the object or event, however
complicated and entangled it may be, and sets the
parts one by one in succession to each other, according
to their natural connection. True, it is still in a state
of barbarism ; yet its intelligence is a reasoning faculty,
which spreads, though unwittingly. Nothing is more
clear than the style of the old French narratives and of
the earliest poems : we do not perceive that we are
following a narrator, so easy is the gait, so even the road
he opens to us, so smoothly and gradually every idea
glides into the next ; and this is why he narrates so well.
The chroniclers Villehardouin, Joinville, Froissart, the
fathers of prose, have an ease and clearness approached
by none, and beyond all, a charm, a grace, which they
had not to go out of their way to find. Grace is a
national possession in France, and springs from the native
delicacy which has a horror of incongruities ; the instinct
of Frenchmen avoids violent shocks in works of taste
as well as in works of argument ; they desire that their
sentiments and ideas shall harmonise, and not clash.
Throughout they have this measured spirit, exquisitely
refined.1 They take care, on a sad subject, not to push
emotion to its limits ; they avoid big words. Think
how Joinville relates in six lines the death of the poor
sick priest who wished to finish celebrating the mass,
and "never more did sing, and died." Open a mystery-
play, Th6opliilv£, or that of the Queen of Hungary, for
instance : when they are going to bum her and her child,
she says two short lines about " this gentle dew which is
so pure an innocent," nothing more. Take a fabliau,

1 See H. Taine, La Fontaine and his Fables, p. 15.

CHAP. 11. THE NORMANS. Ill

even a dramatic one : when the penitent knight, who
has undertaken to fill a barrel with his tears, dies in the
hermit's company, he asks from him only one- last gift :
"Do but embrace me, and then I'll die in the arms of my
friend.'* Could a more touching sentiment be expressed
in more sober language ? We must say of their poetry
what is said of certain pictures : This is made out of
nothing. Is there in the world anything more deli-
cately graceful than the verses of Guillaume de Lorris ?
Allegory clothes his ideas so as to dim their too great
brightness; ideal figures, half transparent, float about
the lover, luminous, yet in a cloud, and lead him amidst
all the gentle and delicate-hued ideas to the rose, whose
" sweet odour embalms all the plain." This refinement
goes so far, that in Thibaut of Champagne and in
Charles of Orleans it turns to affectation and insipidity.
In them all impressions grow more slender; the per-
fume is so weak, that one often fails to catch it; on
their knees before their lady they whisper their
waggeries and conceits ; they love politely and wittily ;
they arrange ingeniously in a bouquet their "painted
words," all the flowers of "fresh and beautiful lan-
guage ; " they know how to mark fleeting ideas in their
flight, soft melancholy, vague reverie; they are as
elegant as talkative, and as charming as the most
amiable abbe's of the eighteenth century. This light-
ness of touch is proper to the race, and appears as
plainly under the armour and amid the massacres of
the middle ages as amid the courtsies and the musk-
scented, wadded coats of the last court. You will find
it in their colouring as in their sentiments. They are
not struck by the magnificence of nature, they see only
her pretty side ; they paint the beauty of a woman by

112 THE SOURCE. BOOK i.

a single feature, which is only polite, saying, " She is
more gracious than the rose in May." They do not
experience the terrible emotion, ecstasy, sudden oppres-
sion of heart which is displayed in the poetry of
neighbouring nations ; they say discreetly, " She began
to smile, which vastly became her." They add, when
they are in a descriptive humour, " that she had a
sweet and perfumed breath," and a body " white as
new-fallen snow on a branch." They do not aspire
higher; beauty pleases, but does not transport them.
They enjoy agreeable emotions, but are not fitted for
deep sensations. The full rejuvenescence of being, the
warm air of spring which renews and penetrates all
existence, suggests but a pleasing couplet ; they remark
in passing, " Now is winter gone, the hawthorn blossoms,
the rose expands," and so pass on about their business.
It is a light gladsomeness, soon gone, like that which
an April landscape affords. For an instant the author
glances at the mist of the streams rising about the
willow trees, the pleasant vapour which imprisons the
brightness of the morning; then, humming a burden
of a song, he returns to his narrative. He seeks
amusement, and herein lies his power.

In life, as in literature, it is pleasure he aims at, not
sensual pleasure or emotion. He is lively, not voluptuous;
dainty, not a glutton. He takes love for a pastime, not
for an intoxication. It is a pretty fruit which he plucks,
tastes, and leaves. And we must remark yet further, that
the best of the fruit in his eyes is the fact of its being for-
bidden. He says to himself that he is duping a husband,
that " he deceives a cruel woman, and thinks he ought
to obtain a pope's indulgence for the deed." J He wishes

1 La Fontaine, Contes, Richard Minutolo*

CHAP. ii. THE NORMANS. 113

to be merry — it is the state he prefers, the end and aim
of his life; and especially to laugh at other people.
The short verse of his fabliaux gambols and leaps like a
schoolboy released from school, over all things respected
or respectable ; criticising the church, women, the great,
the monks. Scoffers, banterers, our fathers have abund-
ance both of expression and matter; and the matter
comes to them so naturally, that without culture, and
surrounded by coarseness, they are as delicate in their
raillery as the most refined. They touch upon ridicule
lightly, they mock without emphasis, as it were inno-
cently ; their style is so harmonious, that at first sight
we make a mistake, and do not see any harm in it.
They seem artiest; they look so very demure ; only a
word shows the imperceptible smile : it is the ass, for
example, which they call the high priest, by reason of
his padded cassock and his serious air, and who gravely
begins " to play the organ." At the close of the
history, the delicate sense of comicality has touched
you, though you cannot say how. They do not call
things by their names, especially in love matters; they
let you guess it ; they assume that you are as sharp and
knowing as themselves.1 A man might discriminate,
embellish at times, perhaps refine upon them, but their
first traits are incomparable. When the fox approaches
the raven to steal the cheese, he begins as a hypocrite,
piously and cautiously, and as one of the family. He
calls the raven his " good father Don Eohart, who sings
so well ; " he praises his voice, " so sweet and fine."
"You would be the best singer in the world if you

1 Parler lui veut d'une besogue
Oh crois que peu conquerr^rois
Si la besogne vous nommois.
VOL. I. I

114 THE SOURCE. BOOK i.

kept clear of nuts." Reynard is a rogue, an artist in
the way of invention, not a mere glutton ; he loves
roguery for its own sake ; he rejoices in his superiority,
and draws out his mockery. When Tibert, the cat, by
his counsel hung himself at the bell rope, wishing to
ring it, he uses irony, enjoys and relishes it, pretends
to wax impatient with the poor fool whom he has
caught, calls him proud, complains because the other
does not answer, and because he wishes to rise to the
clouds and visit the saints. And from beginning to
end this long epic of Keynard the Fox is the same;
the raillery never ceases, and never fails to be agreeable.
Reynard has so much wit, that he is pardoned for
everything. The necessity for laughter is national —
so indigenous to the French, that a stranger cannot
understand, and is shocked by it. This pleasure does
not resemble physical joy in any respect, which is to be
despised for its grossness ; on the contrary, it sharpens
the intelligence, and brings to light many a delicate or
ticklish idea. The fabliaux are full of truths about men,
and still more about women, about people of low rank, and
still more about those of high rank ; it is a method of
philosophising by stealth and boldly, in spite of conven-
tionalism, and in opposition to the powers that be. This
taste has nothing in common either with open satire,
which is offensive because it is cruel ; on the contrary,
it provokes good humour. We soon see that the jester
is not ill-disposed, that he does not wish to wound : if
he stings, it is as a bee, without venom ; an instant
later he is not thinking of it ; if need be, he will take
himself as an object of his pleasantry ; all he wishes is
to keep up in himself and in us sparkling and pleasing
ideas. Do we uot see here in advance an abstract of

CHAP. n. THE NORMANS. 116

the whole French literature, the incapacity for great
poetry, the sudden and durable perfection of prose, the
excellence of all the moods of conversation and elo-
quence, the reign and tyranny of taste and method, the
art and theory of development and arrangement, the
gift of being measured, clear, amusing, and piquant?
We have taught Europe how ideas fall into order, and
which ideas are agreeable ; and this is what our French-
men of the eleventh century are about to teach their
Saxons during five or six centuries, first with the lance,
next with the stick, next with the birch.

IV.

Consider, then, this Frenchman or Norman, this man
from Anjou or Maine, who in his well-knit coat of mail,
with sword and lance, came to seek his fortune in Eng-
land. He took the manor of some slain Saxon, and
settled himself in it with his soldiers and comrades, gave
them land, houses, the right of levying taxes, on condi-
tion of their fighting under him and for him, as men-at-
arms, marshals, standard-bearers ; it was a league in case
of danger. In fact, they were in a hostile and conquered
country, and they have to maintain themselves. Each
one hastened to build for himself a place of refuge, castle
or fortress,1 well fortified, of solid stone, with narrow
windows, strengthened with battlements, garrisoned by
soldiers, pierced with loopholes. Then these men went to
Salisbury, to the number of sixty thousand, all holders of
land, having at least enough to maintain a man with
horse or arms. There, placing their hands in William's,
they promised him fealty and assistance ; and the king's
edict declared that they must be all united and bound

1 At King Stephen's death there were 1115 castles.

116 THE SOURCE. BOOK i.

together like brothers in arms, to defend and succour
each other. They are an armed colony, stationary,
like the Spartans amongst the Helots ; and they make
laws accordingly. When a Frenchman is found dead in
any district, the inhabitants are to give up the murderer,
or failing to do so, they must pay forty-seven marks as a
fine ; if the dead man is English, it rests with the people
of the place to prove it by the oath of four near relatives
of the deceased. They are to beware of killing a stag,
boar, or fawn ; for an offence against the forest-laws they
will lose their eyes. They have nothing of all their pro-
perty assured to them except as alms, or on condition of
paying tribute, or by taking the oath of allegiance. Here
a free Saxon proprietor is made a body-slave on his own
estate.1 Here a noble and rich Saxon lady feels on lier
shoulder the weight of the hand of a Norman valet, who
is become by force her husband or her lover. There
were Saxons of one sol, or of two sols, according to the
sum which they gained for their masters; they sold
them, hired them, worked them on joint account, like an
ox or an ass. One Norman abbot has his Saxon prede-
cessors dug up, and their bones thrown without the gates.
Another keeps men-at-arms, who bring his recalcitrant
monks to reason by blows of their swords. Imagine, if you
can, the pride of these new lords, conquerors, strangers,
masters, nourished by habits of violent activity, and by
the savagery, ignorance, and passions of feudal life.
"They thought they might do whatsoever they pleased,"
say the old chroniclers. " They shed blood indiscrimi-
nately, snatched the morsel of bread from the mouth of
the wretched, and seized upon all the money, the goods,
the land."2 Thus " all the folk in the low country were

1 A. Thierry, Histoire de la Conqu&te de I' Angleterre, ii.
3 William of Malmesbury. A. Thierry, ii. 20. 122-203.

CHAP. n. THE NORMANS. 117

at great pains to seem humble before Ivo Taille-bois, and
only to address him with one knee on the ground;
but although they made a point of paying him every
honour, and giving him all and more than all which they
owed him in the way of rent and service, he harassed,
tormented, tortured, imprisoned them, set his dogs upon
their cattle, . . . broke the legs and backbones of their
beasts of burden, . . . and sent men to attack their
servants on the road with sticks and swords."1 The
Normans would not and could not borrow any idea or
custom from such boors ; 2 they despised them as coarse
and stupid. They stood amongst them, as the Spaniards
amongst the Americans in the sixteenth century, superior
in force and culture, more versed in letters, more expert
in the arts of luxury. They preserved their manners
and their speech. England, to all outward appearance
— the court of the king, the castles of the nobles, the
palaces of the bishops, the houses of the wealthy — was
French; and the Scandinavian people, of whom sixty
years ago the Saxon kings used to have poems sung to
them, thought that the nation had forgotten its language,
and treated it in their laws as though it were no longer
their sister.

It was a French literature, then, which was7 at this
time domiciled across the channel,3 and the conquerors
tried to make it purely French, purged from all Saxon
alloy. They made such a point of this, that the nobles
in the reign of Henry II. sent their sons to France, to

1 A. Thierry.

3 " In the year 652," says Wai ton, L 3, " it was the common prac-
tice of the Anglo-Saxons to send their youth to the monasteries of
France for education ; and not only the language but the manners of
the French were esteemed the most polite accomplishments,"

8 Warton. i. 5.

118 THE SOURCE. BOOK i.

preserve them from barbarisms. "For two hundred
years," says Higden,1 " children in scole, agenst the
usage and manir of all other nations beeth compelled
for to leve hire own langage, and for to construe hir
lessons and hire thynges in Frensche." The statutes
of the universities obliged the students to converse
either in French or Latin. " Gentilmen children beeth
taught to speke Frensche from the tyme that they bith
rokked in hire cradell ; and uplondissche men will
likne himself to gentylmen, and fondeth with greet
besynesse for to speke Frensche." Of course the poetry
is French. The Norman brought his minstrel with
him; there was Taillefer, the jongleur, who sang the
Song of Roland at the battle of Hastings ; there was
Adeline, the jongkuse, who received an estate in the
partition which followed the Conquest. The Norman
who ridiculed the Saxon kings, who dug up the Saxon
saints, and cast them without the walls of the church,
loved none but French ideas and verses. It was into
French verse that Robert Wace rendered the legendary
history of the England which was conquered, and the
actual history of the Normandy in which he continued
to live. Enter one of the abbeys where the minstrels
come to sing, "where the clerks after dinner and
supper read poems, the chronicles of kingdoms, the
wonders of the world,"2 you will only find Latin or
French verses, Latin or French prose. What becomes

1 Trevisa's translation of the Polycronycon.

2 Statutes of foundation of New College, Oxford. In the abbey of
Glastonbury, in 1247 : Liber de excidio Trqjce, gesta Ricardi regis, ge-sta
Alexandra Magni, etc. In the abbey of Peterborough : Amys ei
Amelion, Sir Tristam, Guy de Eourgogne, gesta Otuclis, les prophttiei
d& Merlin, le Charlemagne de Turpin, la destruction ds Troie. etc.
Warton, ibid.em.

CHAP. IT. THE NORMANS. 119

of English? Obscure, despised, we hear it no more,
except in the mouths of degraded franklins, outlaws of
the forest, swineherds, peasants, the lowest orders. It
is no longer, or scarcely written ; gradually we find in
the Saxon chronicle that the idiom alters, is extin-
guished; the chronicle itself ceases within a century
after the Conquest1 The people who have leisure or
security enough to read or write are French ; for them
authors devise and compose; literature always adapts
itself to the taste of those who can appreciate and pay
for it. Even the English2 endeavour to write in
French : thus Kobert Grostete, in his allegorical poem
on Christ ; Peter Langtoft, in his Chronicle of England,
and in his Life of Thomas & Becket ; Hugh de Rothe-
land, in his poem of Hippomedon ; John Hoveden, and
many others. Several write the first half of the verse
in English, and the second in French ; a strange sign
of the ascendency which is moulding and oppressing
them. Even in the fifteenth century,8 many of these
poor folk are employed in this task; French is the
language of the court, from it arose all poetry and
elegance ; he is but a clodhopper who is inapt at that
style. They apply themselves to it as our old scholars
did to Latin verses ; they are gallicised as those were
latinised, by constraint, with a sort of fear, knowing
well that they are but schoolboys and provincials.
Gower, one of their best poets, at the end of his French
works, excuses himself humbly for n'ot having "de
Franqais la faconde. Pardonnez moi," he says, "que
de ce je forsvoie ; je suis Anglais."

1 In 1154. 2 Warton, i. 72-78.

8 In 1400. Warton, ii. 248. Gower died in 1408 ; his French
ballads belong to the end of the fourteenth century.

120 THE SOURCE. BOOK i.

And yet, after all, neither the race nor the tongue
has perished. It is necessary that the Norman should
learn English, in order to command his tenants ; his
Saxon wife speaks it to him, and his sons receive it
from the lips of their nurse; the contagion is strong,
for he is obliged to send them to France, to preserve
them from the jargon which on his domain threatens
to overwhelm and spoil them. From generation to
generation the contagion spreads ; they breathe it in
the air, with the foresters in the chase, the farmers in
the field, the sailors on the ships : for these coarse people,
shut in by thek animal existence, are not the kind to
learn a foreign language ; by the simple weight of their
dulness they impose their idiom on their conquerors, at all
events such words as pertain to living things. Scholarly
speech, the language of law, abstract and philosophical
expressions, — in short, all words depending on reflec-
tion and culture may be French, since there is nothing
to prevent it. This is just what happens ; these kind of
ideas and this kind of speech are not understood by the
commonalty, who, not being able to touch them, cannot
change them. This produces a French, a colonial French,
doubtless perverted, pronounced with closed mouth, with
a contortion of the organs of speech, "after the school of
Stratford-atte-Bow ; " yet it is still French. On the
other hand, as regards the speech employed about com-
mon actions and visible objects, it is the people, the
Saxons, who fix it; these living words are too firmly
rooted in his experience to allow of being parted with,
and thus the whole substance of the language cornea
from him. Here, then, we have the Norman who, slowly
and constrainedly, speaks and understands English, a
deformed, gallicised English, yet English, in sap and root ;

CHAP, u THE NORMANS. 121

but he has taken his time about it, for it has required
two centuries. It was only under Henry III. that the
new tongue is complete, with the new constitution ; and
that, after the like fashion, by alliance and intermixture ;
the burgesses come to take their seats in Parliament
with the nobles, at the same time that Saxon words settle
down in the language side by side with French words.

V.

So was modern English formed, by compromise, and
the necessity of being understood. But we can well
imagine that these nobles, even wliile speaking the rising
dialect, have their hearts full of French tastes and ideas ;
France remains the home of their mind, and the litera-
ture which now begins, is but translation. Translators,
copyists, imitators — there is nothing else. England is
a distant province, which is to France what the United
States were, thirty years ago, to Europe : she exports
her wool, and imports her ideas. Open the Voyage and
Travaile of Sir John Maundeville,1 the oldest prose-
writer, the Villehardouin of the country : his book is
but the translation of a translation.2 He writes first in
Latin, the language of scholars; then in French, the

1 He wrote in 1356, aud died in 1372.

8 " And for als moche as it is longe time passed that ther was no
generalle Passage ne Vyage over the See, and many Men desiren for to
here speke of the holy Lond, and han thereof gret Solace and Comfort,
I, John Maundevylle, Knyght, alle be it I be not worthi, that was born
in Englond, in the town of Seynt-Albones, passed the See in the Zeer of
our Lord Jesu-Crist 1322, in the Day of Seynt Michelle, aud hidreto
have been longe tyme over the See, and have seyn and gon thorghe
manye dyverse londes, and many Provynces, and Kingdomes, and lies.

" And zee shulle undirstonde that I have put this Boke out of Latyn
into Frensche, and translated it azen out of Frensche, into Englyssche,
that every Man of my Nacioun may undirstonde it." — Sir John Maun
deville's V&uaqe and Travaile. ed. Halliwell, 1866, prologue, p. 4.

122 THE SOURCE. BOOK i.

language of society; finally he reflects, and discovers
that the barons, his compatriots, by governing the Saxon
churls, have ceased to speak their own Norman, and
that the rest of the nation never knew it ; he translates
his manuscript into English, and, in addition, takes
care to make it plain, feeling that he speaks to less ex-
panded understandings. He says in French : — " II
advint une fois que Mahomet allait dans une chapelle ou
il y avait un saint ermite. II entra en la chapelle oft il
y avait une petite huisserie et basse, et e*tait bien petite
la chapelle; et alors devint la porte si grande qu'il
semblait que ce fut la porte d'un palais."

He stops, corrects himself, wishes to explain himself
better for his readers across the Channel, and says in
English : — " And at the Desertes of Arabye, he wente
into a Chapelle where a Eremyte duelte. And whan he
entred in to the Chapelle that was but a lytille and a
low thing, and had but a lytill Dore and a low, than the
Entree began to wexe so gret and so large, and so highe,
as though it had ben of a gret Mynstre, or the Zate of
a Paleys." l You perceive that he amplifies, and thinks
himself bound to clinch and drive in three or four times
in succession the same idea, in order to get it into an
English brain ; his thought is drawn out, dulled, spoiled
in the process. Like every copy, the new literature is
mediocre, and repeats what it imitates, with fewer merits
and greater faults.

Let us see, then, what our Norman baron gets trans-
lated for. him ; first, the chronicles of Geoffrey Gaimar

1 Sir John Maundcville's Voyage and Travaile, ed. Halliwell, 1866,
xii p. 139. It is confessed that the original on which "Wace depended
for his ancient History of England is the Latin compilation of Geoffrej
of Monmoutli.

CHAP. II.

THE NORMAL 8.

123

and Eobert Wace, which consist of the fabulous history
of England continued up to their day, a dull-rhymed
rhapsody, turned into English in a rhapsody no less dull
The first Englishman who attempts it is Layamon,1 a
monk of Ernely, still fettered in the old idiom, who
sometimes happens to rhyme, sometimes fails, altogether
barbarous and childish, unable to develop a continuous
idea, babbling in little confused and incomplete phrases,
after the fashion of the ancient Saxons; after hirn a
monk, Robert of Gloucester, 2 and a canon, Eobert of

1 Extract from the account of the proceedings at Arthur's coronation
given by Layarnon, in his translation of Wace, executed about 1180.
Madden's Layamon, 1847, ii. p. 625, et passim :

Tha the king igeten hafde

And al his mon-weorede,

Tha bugen ut of bnrhge

Theines swithe balde.

Alle tha kinges,

And heore here-thringes.

Alle tha biscopes,

And alle tha clserckes,

All the eorles,

And alle tha beornes.

Alle tha theines,

Alle the sweines,
Feire iscrudde,
Helde geond felde.
Summe heo gunnen semen,
Summe heo gunnen urnen,
Summe heo gunnen lepen,
Summe heo gunnen sceoten,
Summe heo wraestleden
And wither-gome makeden,
Summe heo on uelde
Pleouweden under scelde,
Summe heo driven balles
Wide geond tha feldes.

Monianes kunnes gomen
Ther heo gunnen driuen.
And wha s\va mihte iwinne
Wurthscipe of his gomene,
Hine me ladde mid songe
At foren than leod kinge :
And the king, for his gomene,
Gaf him geven gode.
Alle tha quene
The icumen weoren there,
And alle tha lafdies,
Leoneden geond walles,
To bihalden the dugethen,
And that folc plseie.
This ilseste threo dseges,
Swulc gomes and swulc plreges,
Tha, at than veorthe dseie
The king gon to spekene
And agaef his goden cnihten
All heore rihten ;
He gef seolver, he gaef gold,
He gef hors, he gef lond,
Castles, and clcethes eke ;
His monnen he iquende.

After 1297.

124 THE SOURCE. BOOK i.

Brunne, both as insipid and clear as their French
models, having become gallicised, and adopted the signi-
ficant characteristic of the race, namely, the faculty and
habit of easy narration, of seeing moving spectacles
without deep emotion, of writing prosaic poetry, of dis-
coursing and developing, of believing that phrases ending
in the same sounds form real poetry. Our honest
English versifiers, like their preceptors in Normandy and
Ile-de-France, garnished with rhymes their dissertations
and histories, and called them poems. At this epoch, in
fact, on the Continent, the whole learning of the schools
descends into the street; and Jean de Meung, in his
poem of la Rose, is the most tedious of doctors. So in
England, Eobert of Brunne transposes into verse the
Manuel des PeMs of Bishop Grostete; Adam Davie,1
certain Scripture histories ; Hampole 2 composes the
Pricke of Conscience. The titles alone make one yawn :
what of the text ?

" Mankyiide mad ys to do Goddus wylle,
And alle Hys byddyngus to fulfille ;
For of al Hys niakyng more and les,
Man most principal creature es.
Al that He made for man hit was done,
As ye schal here after sone."3

There is a poem ! You did not think so ; call it a ser-
mon, if you will give it its proper name. It goes on,
well divided, well prolonged, flowing, but void of
meaning ; the literature which surrounds and resembles
it bears witness of its origin by its loquacity and its
clearness.

It bears witness to it by other and more agreeable

1 About 1312. 2 About 1349. 3 Warton, ii. 36.

CHAP. ii. THE NORMANS. 125

features. Here and there we find divergences more or
less awkward into the domain of genius ; for instance, a
ballad full of quips against Richard, King of the Romans,
who was taken at the battle of Lewes. Sometimes,
charm is not lacking, nor sweetness either. No one has
ever spoken so bright and so well to the ladies as the
French of the Continent, and they have not quite for-
gotten this talent while settling in England. You per-
ceive it readily in the manner in which they celebrate
the Virgin. Nothing could be more different from the
Saxon sentiment, which is altogether biblical, than the
chivalric adoration of the sovereign Lady, the fascinat-
ing Virgin and Saint, who was the real deity of the
middle ages. It breathes in this pleasing hymn :

" Blessed beo thu, lavedi,
Ful of hovene blisse ;
Swete flur of parais,
Moder of milternisse. . . .
I-blessed beo thu, Lavedi,
So fair and so briht ;
Al min hope is uppon the,
Bi day and bi nieht. . . .
Bricht and scene quen of storre,
So me liht and lere.
In this false fikele world,
So me led and steore."1

There is but a short and easy step between this tender
worship of the Virgin and the sentiments of the court of
love. The English rhymesters take it ; and when they
wish to praise their earthly mistresses, they borrow, here
as elsewhere, the ideas and the very form of French

1 Time of Henry III., Reliquiae Anliquice, edited by Messrs. Wright
Rnd Halliwell, i. 102.

126 THE SOURCE. BOOK L

verse. One compares his lady to all kinds of precioua
stones and flowers ; others sing truly" amorous songs, at
times sensual :

" Bytuene Mershe and Aueril,
When spray biginneth to springe,
The lutel foul hath hire wyl
On hyre lud to synge,
Ich libbe in louelonginge
For semlokest of alle thynge.
He may me blysse bringe,
Icham in hire baundouu.
An bendy hap ichabbe yhent,
Ichot from heuene it is me sent.
From alle wymmen my love is lent,
And lyht on Alisoun."1

Another sings :

" Suete lemmon, y preye the, of loue one speche,
Whil y lyue in world so wyde other mille y seche.
With thy loue, my suete leof, mi bliss thou mihtes eche
A suete cos of thy mouth mihte be my leche."2

Is not this the lively and warm imagination of the south ?
they speak of springtime and of love, " the fine and lovely
weather," like trouv&res, even like troubadours. The
dirty, smoke-grimed cottage, the black feudal castle,
where all but the master lie higgledy-piggledy on the
straw in the great stone hall, the cold rain, the muddy
earth, make the return of the sun and the warm air
delicious.

" Sumer is i-cumen in.
Lhude sing cuccu :
Groweth sed, and bloweth med.
And springeth the wde nu.

1 About 1278. Warton, L 28. 8 Ibid. i. 81.

OHAP. ii. THE NOEMANS. 127

Sing cuccu, cuccu.
Awe bleteth after lomb.
Llouth after calue cu,
Bnlluc sterteth, bucke verteth :

Murie sing cuccu,

Cuccu, cuccu.
Wei singes thu cuccu ;
Ne swik thu nauer nu.

Sing, cuccu nu,

Sing, cuccu.1

Here are glowing pictures, such as Guillaume de Lorris
was writing, at the same time, even richer and more life-
like, perhaps because the poet found here for inspiration
that love of country life which in England is deep and
national. Others, more imitative, attempt pleasantries
like those of Rutebeuf and the fabliaux, frank quips,2 and
even satirical loose waggeries. Their true aim and end
is to hit out at the monks. In every French country or
country which imitates France, the most manifest use
of convents is to furnish material for sprightly and
scandalous stories. One writes, for instance, of the
kind of life the monks lead at the abbey of Cocagne :

" There is a wel fair abbei,
Of white monkes and of grei.
Ther beth bowris and halles :
Al of pasteiis beth the wallis,
Of fleis, of fisse, and rich met,
The likfullist that man may et.
Fluren cakes beth the schingles alle,
Of cherche, cloister, boure, and halle.

1 Warton, i. 30.

8 Poem of the Owl and Nightingale, who dispute as to which lias the
finest voice.

128 THE SOURCE BOOK i,

The pinnes beth fat podinges

Rich met to princes and kinges. . . .

Though paradis be miri and bright

Cokaign is of fairir sight. . . .

Another abbei is therbi,

Forsoth a gret fair nimnerie. . . .

When the someris dai is hote

The young nunnes takith a bote . . .

And doth ham forth in that river

Both with ores and with stere. . . .

And euch monk him takith on,

And snellich berrith forth har prei

To the mochil grei abbei,

And techith the nunnes an oreisun,

With iambleue up and down."

This is the triumph of gluttony and feeding. Moreover
many things could be mentioned in the middle ages,
which are now unmentionable. But it was the poems
of chivalry which represented to him the bright side of
his own mode of life, that the baron preferred to have
translated. He desired that his trouv&re should set
before his eyes the magnificence which he displayed,
and the luxury and enjoyments which he has introduced
from France. Life at that time, without and even
during war, was a great pageant, a brilliant and tumultu-
ous kind of fete. When Henry II. travelled, he took
with him a great number of horsemen, foot-soldiers,
baggage-waggons, tents, pack-horses, comedians, courte-
sans, and their overseers, cooks, confectioners, posture-
makers, dancers, barbers, go-betweens, hangers-on.1 In
the morning when they start, the assemblage begins to
shout, sing, hustle each other, make racket and rout,

1 Letter of Peter of Bloia.

CHAP. ii. THE NORMANS. 129

" as if hell were let loose." William Longchamps, even
in time of peace, would not travel without a thousand
horses by way of escort. When Archbishop & Becket
came to France, he entered the town with two hundred
knights, a number of barons and nobles, and an army
of servants, all richly armed and equipped, he himself
being provided with four-and-twenty suits ; two hun-
dred and fifty children walked in front, singing national
songs ; then dogs, then carriages, then a dozen pack-
horses, each ridden by an ape and a man ; then equerries
with shields and war-horses ; then more equerries, fal-
coners, a suite of domestics, knights, priests ; lastly, the
archbishop himself, with his private friends. Imagine
these processions, and also these entertainments ; for the
Normans, after the Conquest, " borrowed from the Saxons
the habit of excess in eating and drinking."1 At the
marriage of Eichard Plantagenet, Earl of Cornwall,
they provided thirty thousand dishes.2 They also con-
tinued to be gallant, and punctiliously performed the
great precept of the love courts; for in the middle
age the sense of love was no more idle than the others.
Moreover, tournaments were plentiful ; a sort of
opera prepared for their own entertainment. So ran
their life, full of adventure and adornment, in the open
air and in the sunlight, with show of cavalcades and
arms ; they act a pageant, and act it with enjoyment.
Thus the King of Scots, having come to London with a

1 "William of Malmesbury.

8 At the installation-feast of George Nevill, Archbishop of York,
the brother of Guy of Warwick, there were consumed, 104 oxen and 6
wild bulls, 1000 sheep, 304 calves, as many hogs, 2000 swine, 500 stags,
bucks, and does, 204 kids, 22,802 wild or tame fowl, 300 quarters of
corn, 300 tuns of ale, 100 of wine, a pipe of hypocras, 12 porpoises and
seals.

VOL. I. K

130 THE SOURCE. BOOK i

hundred knights, at the coronation of Edward I., they all
dismounted, and made over their horses and superb
caparisons to the people ; as did also five English lords;
imitating their example. In the midst of war they took
their pleasure. Edward III., in one of his expeditions
against the King of France, took with him thirty fal-
coners, and made his campaign alternately hunting and
fighting.1 Another time, says Froissart, the knights
who joined the army carried a plaster over one eye,
having vowed not to remove it until they had performed
an exploit worthy of their mistresses. Out of the very
exuberancy of spirit they practised the art of poetry ;
out of the buoyancy of their imagination they made a
sport of life. Edward III. built, at Windsor a hall and
a round table ; and at one of his tourneys in London,
sixty ladies, seated on palfreys, led, as in a fairy tale,
each her knight by a golden chain. Was not this the
triumph of the gallant and frivolous French fashions ?
Edward's wife Philippa sat as a model to the artists for
their Madonnas. She appeared on the field of battle ;
listened to Froissart, who provided her with moral-plays,
love-stories, and " things fair to listen to." At once
goddess, heroine, and scholar, and all this so agreeably,
was she not a true queen of refined chivalry ? Now, as
also in France under Louis of Orleans and the Dukes
of Burgundy, this most elegant and romanesque civilisa-
tion came into full bloom, void of common sense,
given up to passion, bent on pleasure, immoral and
brilliant, but, like its neighbours of Italy and Provence,
for lack of serious intention, it could not last.

Of all these marvels the narrators make display in

3 These prodigalities and refinements grew to excess under his grand-
son Richard II.

CHAP. ii. THE NORMANS. 131

their stories. Here is a picture of the vessel which
took the mother of King Eichard into England ; —

" Swlk 011 lie seygh they never non ;
All it was whyt of huel-bon,
And every nayl with gold begrave :
Off pure gold was the stave.
Her mast was of yvory ;
Off samyte the sayl wytterly.
Her ropes wer off tuely sylk,
Al so whyt as ony mylk.
That noble schyp was al withoute,
With clothys of golde sprede aboute ;
And her loof and her wyndas,
Off asure forsothe it was."1

On such subjects they never run dry. When the
King of Hungary wishes to console his afflicted daughter,
he proposes to take her to the chase in the following
style : —

" To-morrow ye shall in hunting fare :
And ride, my daughter, in a chair ;
It shall be covered with velvet red,
And cloths of fine gold all about your head,
With damask white and azure blue,
Well diapered with lilies new.
Your pommels shall be ended with gold,
Your chains enamelled many a fold,
Your mantle of rich degree,
Purple pall and ermine free.
Jennets of Spain that ben so light,
Trapped to the ground with velvet bright.
Ye shall have harp, sautry, and song,
% And other mirths you among.

2 Warton, L 166.

132 THE SOURCE.

Ye shall have Rumney and Malespine,

Both hippocras and Vernage wine ;

Montrese and wine of Greek,

Both Algrade and despice eke,

Antioch and Bastarde,

Pyment also and garnarde ;

Wine of Greek and Muscadel,

Both clare, pyment, and Rochelle,

The reed your stomach to defy,

And pots of osey set you by.

You shall have venison ybake,

The best wild fowl that may be take ;

A leish of harehound with you to streek,

And hart, and hind, and other like.

Ye shall be set at such a tryst,

That hart and hynd shall come to you fist,

Your disease to drive you fro,

To hear the bugles there yblow.

Homeward thus shall ye ride,

On hawking by the river's side,

With gosshawk and with gentle falcon,

With bugle-horn and merlion.

When you come home your menie among,

Ye shall have revel, dance, and song ;

Little children, great and small,

Shall sing as does the nightingale.

Then shall ye go to your evensong,

With tenors and trebles among.

Threescore of copes of damask bright,

Full of pearls they shall be pight.

Your censors shall be of gold,

Indent with azure many a fold ;

Your quire nor organ song shall want,

With contre-note and descant.

The other half on organs playing,

With young children full fain singing.

CHAP. ii. THE NORMANS. 133

Then shall ye go to your supper,

And sit in tents in green arber,

With cloth of arras pight to the ground,

With sapphires set of diamond.

A hundred knights, truly told,

Shall play with bowls in alleys cold,

Your disease to drive away ;

To see the fishes in pools play,

To a drawbridge then shall ye,

Th' one half of stone, th' other of tree ;

A barge shall meet you full right,

With twenty-four oars full bright,

With trumpets and with clarion,

The fresh water to row up and down. •;. ,v

Forty torches burning bright

At your bridge to bring you light.

Into your chamber they shall you bring,

With much mirth and more liking.

Your blankets shall be of fustian,

Your sheets shall be of cloth of Reunes.

Your head sheet shall be of pery pight,

With diamonds set and rubies bright.

When you are laid in bed so soft,

A cage of gold shall hang aloft,

With long paper fair burning,

And cloves that be sweet smelling.

Frankincense and olibanum.

That when ye sleep the taste may come ;

And if ye no rest can take,

All night minstrels for you shall wake." '

Amid such fancies and splendours the poets delight
and lose themselves ; and the woof, like the embroideries
of their canvas, bears the mark of this love of deco-

1 Warton, i. 176, spelling modernised.

134 THE SOUKOE. BOOK i.

ration. They weave it out of adventures, of extraordi-
nary and surprising events. Now it is the life of King
Horn, who, thrown into a boat when a lad, is wrecked
upon the coast of England, and, becoming a knight, re-
conquers the kingdom of his father. Now it is the
history of Sir Guy, who rescues enchanted knights, cuts
down the giant Colbrand, challenges and kills the Sultan
in his tent. It is not for me to recount these poems,
which are not English, but only translations ; still, here
as in France, there are many of them ; they fill the
imagination of the young society, and they grow in
exaggeration, until, falling to the lowest depth of in-
sipidity and improbability, they are buried for ever by
Cervantes. What would people say of a society which
nad no literature but the opera with its unrealities ?
Yet it was a literature of this kind which formed the
intellectual food of the middle ages. People then
did not ask for truth, but entertainment, and that
vehement and hollow, full of glare and startling events.
They asked for impossible voyages, extravagant chal-
lenges, a racket of contests, a confusion of magnificence
and entanglement of chances. For introspective history
they had no liking, cared nothing for the adventures of
the heart, devoted their attention to the outside. They
remained children to the last, with eyes glued to a series
of exaggerated and coloured images, and, for lack of
thinking, did not perceive that they had learnt nothing.
What was there beneath this fanciful dream ? Brutal
and evil human passions, unchained at first by religious
fury, then delivered up to their own devices, and,
beneath a show of external courtesy, as vile as ever.
Look at the popular king, Kichard Cceur de Lion, and
reckon up his butcheries and murders : " King Kichard,"

CHAP. ii. THE NORMANS. 135

says a poem, " is the best king ever mentioned in song."1
I have no objection ; but if he has the heart of a lion,
he has also that brute's appetite. One day, under the
walls of Acre, being convalescent, he had a great desire
for some pork. There was no pork. They killed a
young Saracen, fresh and tender, cooked and salted
him, and the king ate him and found him very good ;
whereupon he desired to see the head of the pig.
The cook brought it in trembling. The king falls a
laughing, and says the army has nothing to fear from
famine, having provisions ready at hand. He takes
the town, and presently Saladin's ambassadors come to
sue for pardon for the prisoners. Eichard has thirty
of the most noble beheaded, and bids his cook boil the
heads, and serve one to each ambassador, with a ticket
bearing the name and family of the dead man. Mean-
while, in their presence, he eats his own with a relish, bids
them tell Saladin how the Christians make war, and ask
him if it is true that they fear him. Then he orders the
sixty thousand prisoners to be led into the plain :

" They were led into the place full even,
There they heard angels of heaven ;
They said : " Seigneures, tuez, tuez !
Spares hem nought, and beheadeth these !"
King Richard heard the angels' voice,
And thanked God and the holy cross."

Thereupon they behead them all. When he took a town,
it was his wont to murder every one, even children and
women. Such was the devotion of the middle ages,
not only in romances, as here, but in history. At the

1 Warton, i. 123 :

" In Fraunce these rhymes were wrcht,
Every Englyshe ne knew it not"

136 THE SOURCE. BOOK i.

taking of Jerusalem the whole population, seventy
thousand persons, were massacred.

Thus even in chivalrous stories the fierce and
unbridled instincts of the bloodthirsty brute break out
The authentic narratives show it. Henry II. irritated
at a page, attempted to tear out his eyes.1 John
Lackland let twenty-three hostages die in prison of
hunger. Edward II. caused at one time twenty-eight
nobles to be hanged and disembowelled, and was himself
put to death by the insertion of a red-hot iron into his
bowels. Look in Froissart for the debaucheries and mur-
ders in France as well as in England, of the Hundred
Years' War, and then for the slaughters of the Wars of
the Roses. In both countries feudal independence ended
in civil war, and the middle age founders under its vices.
Chivalrous courtesy, which cloaked the native ferocity,
disappears like some hangings suddenly consumed by
the breaking out of a fire ; at that time in England
they killed nobles in preference, and prisoners too, even
children, with insults, in cold blood. What, then, did
man learn in this civilisation and by this literature ?
How was he humanised? What precepts of justice,
habits of reflection, store of true judgments, did this
culture interpose between his desires and his actions,
in order to moderate his passion ? He dreamed, he
imagined a sort of elegant ceremonial in order the bettei
to address lords and ladies; he discovered the gallant
code of little Jehan de Saintre*. But where is the true
education ? Wherein has Froissart profited by all his
vast experience ? He was a fine specimen of a babbling
child ; what they called his poesy, the potsie neuve, is
only a refined gabble, a senile puerility. Some rheto-

1 See Lingard's History, ii. 55, note 4.— TR.

CHAP. ii. THE NORMANS. 137

ricians, like Christine de Pisan, try to round their periods
after an ancient model ; but all their literature amounts
to nothing. No one can think. Sir John Maundeville,
who travelled all over the world a hundred and fifty
years after Villehardouin, is as contracted in his ideas
as Villehardouin himself. Extraordinary legends and
fables, every sort of credulity and ignorance, abound in
his book. When he wishes to explain why Palestine
has passed into the hands of various possessors instead
of continuing under one government, he says that it is
because God would not that it should continue longer
in the hands of traitors and sinners, whether Christians
or others. He has seen at Jerusalem, on the steps of
the temple, the footmarks of the ass which our lord rode
on Palm Sunday. He describes the Ethiopians as a
people who have only one foot, but so large that they
can make use of it as a parasol. He instances one
island "where be people as big as gyants, of 28 feet
long, and have no cloathing but beasts' skins;" then
another island, " where there are many evil and foul
women, but have precious stones in their eyes, and
nave such force that if they behold any man with wrath,
they slay him with beholding, as the basilisk doth."
The good man relates ; that is all : doubt and common
sense scarcely exist in the world he lives in. He has
neither judgment nor reflection ; he piles facts one on
top of another, with no further connection ; his book is
simply a mirror which reproduces recollections of his
eyes and ears. "And all those who will say a Pater
and an Ave Maria in my behalf, I give them an interest
and a share in all the holy pilgrimages I ^ver made in
my life." That is his farewell, and accords with all
the rest. Neither public morality nor public knowledge

138 THE SOURCE. BOOK i.

has gained anything from these three centuries of cul-
ture. This French culture, copied in vain throughout
Europe, has but superficially adorned mankind, and the
varnish with which it decked them, is already tarnished
everywhere or scales off. It was worse in England,
where the thing was more superficial and the application
worse than in France, where foreign hands laid it on, and
where it could only half cover the Saxon crust, where
that crust was worn away and rough. That is the
reason why, during three centuries, throughout the whole
first feudal age, the literature of the Normans in
England, made up of imitations, translations, and clumsy
copies, ends in nothing.

VI.

Meantime, what has become of the conquered people ?
Has the old stock, on which the brilliant continental
flowers were grafted, engendered no literary shoot of its
own ? Did it continue barren during all this time under
the Norman axe, which stripped it of all its buds ? It
grew very feebly, but it grew nevertheless. The subju-
gated race is not a dismembered nation, dislocated,
uprooted, sluggish, like the populations of the Continent,
which, after the long Roman oppression, were given up
to the unrestrained invasion of barbarians ; it increased,
remained fixed in its own soil, full of sap : its members
were not displaced ; it was simply lopped in order to
receive on its crown a cluster of foreign branches. True,
it had suffered, but at last the wound closed, the saps
mingled. Even the hard, stiff ligatures with which the
Conqueror bound it, henceforth contributed to its fixity
and vigour. The land was mapped out ; every title veri-

CHAP. ii. THE NQRMANS. 139

fied, defined in writing;1 every right or tenure valued;
every man registered as to his locality, and also his con-
dition, duties, descent, and resources, so that the whole
nation was enveloped in a network of which not a mesh
would break. Its future development had to be within
these limits. Its constitution was settled, and in this posi-
tive and stringent enclosure men were compelled to un-
fold themselves and to act. Solidarity and strife ; these
were the two effects of the great and orderly establishment
which shaped and held together, on one side the aristo-
cracy of the conquerors, on the other the conquered people;
even as in Eome the systematic fusing of conquered
peoples into the plebs, and the constrained organisation of
the patricians in contrast with the plebs, enrolled the
private individuals in two orders, whose opposition and
union formed the state. Thus, here as in Eome, the
national character was moulded and completed by the
habit of corporate action, the respect for written law,
political and' practical aptitude, the development of
combative and patient energy. It was the Domesday
Book which, binding this young society in a rigid dis-
cipline, made of the Saxon the Englishman of our own
day.

Gradually and slowly, amidst the gloomy complain-
ings of the chroniclers, we find the new man fashioned by
action, like a child who cries because steel stays, though
they improve his figure, give him pain. However
reduced and downtrodden the Saxons were, they did not

1 Domesday Book. Fronde's Hist, of England, 1858, L 13 :
" Through all these arrangements a single aim is visible, that every
man in England should have his definite place and definite duty assigned
to him, and that no human being should be at liberty to lead at his own
pleasure an unaccountable existence. The discipline of an army was
transferred to the details of social life."

140 THE SOURCE. BOOK i.

all sink into the populace. Some,1 almost in every
county, remained lords of their estates, on the condi-
tion of doing homage for them to the king. Many
became vassals of Norman barons, and remained proprie-
tors on this condition. A greater number became
socagers, that is, free proprietors, burdened with a tax,
but possessed of the right of alienating their property ;
and the Saxon villeins found patrons in these, as the
plebs formerly did in the Italian nobles who were trans-
planted to Eome. The patronage of the Saxons who
preserved their integral position was effective, for
they were not isolated : marriages from the first united
the two races, as it had the patricians and plebeians of
Rome;2 a Norman brother-in-law to a Saxon, defended
himself in defending him. In those turbulent times,
and in an armed community, relatives and allies were
obliged to stand shoulder to shoulder in order to keep their
ground. After all, it was necessary for the new-comers
to consider their subjects, for these subjects had the
heart and courage of men : the Saxons, like the plebeians
at Rome, remembered their native rank and their origi-
nal independence. We can recognise it in the complaints
and indignation of the chroniclers, in the growling and
menaces of popular revolt, in the long bitterness with
which they continually recalled their ancient liberty, in

1 Domesday Book, " tenants-in-chief."

2 According to Ailred (temp. Hen. II.), " a king, many bishops and
abbots, many great earls and noble knights descended both from English
and Norman blood, constituted a support to the one and an honour to
the other." " At present," says another author of the same period,
"as the English and Normans dwell together, and have constantly
intermarried, the two nations are so completely mingled together, that
at least as regards freemen, one can scarcely distinguish who is Norman
and who English. . . . The villeins attached to the soil," he says again.
" are alone of pure Saxon blood."

CHAP. ii. THE NORMANS. 141

the favour with which they cherished the daring and
rebellion of outlaws. There were Saxon families at
the end of the twelfth century, who had bound them-
selves by a perpetual vow, to wear long beards from
father to son in memory of the national custom and of
the old country. Such men, even though fallen to the
condition of socagers, even sunk into villeins, had a
stiffer neck than the wretched colonists of the Continent,
trodden down and moulded by four centuries of Eoman
taxation. By their feelings as well as by their condi-
tion, they were the broken remains, but also the living
elements, of a free people. They did not suffer the ex-
tremities of oppression. They constituted the body of
the nation, the laborious, courageous body which supplied
its energy. The great barons felt that they must rely
upon them in their resistance to the king. Very soon,
in stipulating for themselves, they stipulated for all
freemen,1 even for merchants and villeins. There-
after "No merchant shall be dispossessed of his mer-
chandise, no villein of the instruments of his labour ;
no freeman, merchant, or villein shall be taxed unreason-
ably for a small crime ; no freeman shall be arrested,
or imprisoned, or disseised of his land, or outlawed, or
destroyed in any manner, but by the lawful judgment of
his peers, or by the law of the land." Thus protected
they raise themselves and act. In each county there
was a court, where all freeholders, small or great, came to
deliberate about the municipal affairs, administer justice,
and appoint tax-assessors. The red-bearded Saxon, with
his clear complexion and great white teeth, came and
sate by the Norman's side ; these were franklins like the
one whom Chaucer describes :

1 Ma#na Charta, 1215.

142 THE SOURCE. BOOK i.

" A Frankelein was in this compagnie ;
White was his berd, as is the dayesie.
Of his complexion he was sanguin,
Wei loved he by the morwe a sop in win,
To liven in delit was ever his wone,
For he was Epicures owen sone,
That held opinion that plein delit
Was veraily felicite parfite.
An housholder, and that a grete was he,
Seint Julian he was in his contree.
His brede, his ale, was alway after on ;
A better envyned man was no wher non.
Withouten bake mete never was his hotis,
Of fish and flesh, and that so plenteous,
It snewed in his hous of mete and drinke,
Of all deintees that men coud of thinke ;
After the sondry sesons of the yere,
So changed he his mete and his soupere.
Ful many a fat uartrich had he in mewe,
And many a breme, and many a luce in stewe.
Wo was his coke but if his sauce were
Poinant and sharpe, and redy all his gere.
His table, dormant in his halle alway
Stode redy covered alle the longe day.
At sessions ther was he lord and sire.
Ful often time he was knight of the shire.
An anelace and a gipciere all of silk,
Heng at his girdle, white as morwe milk.
A shereve hadde he ben, and a contour.
Was no wher swiche a worthy vavasour." l

With him occasionally in the assembly, oftenest
among the audience, were the yeomen, farmers, foresters,
tradesmen, his fellow-countrymen, muscular and resolute

1 Chaucer's Works, ed. Sir H. Nicholas, 6 vols., 1845, Prologue to
the Canterbury Tales, ii. p. 1 1, L 333

GEOFFREY CHAUCER.

CHAP. Ti. THE NORMANS. 143

men, not slow in the defence of their property, and in
supporting him who would take their cause in hand,
with voice, fist, and weapons. Is it likely that the
discontent of such men to whom the following descrip-
tion applies could be overlooked ?

" The Miller was a stout carl for the nones,
Fill bigge he was of braun and eke of bones ;
That proved wel, for over all ther he came,
At wrastling he wold bere away the ram.
He was short shuldered brode, a thikke gnarre,
Ther n'as no dore, that he n'olde heve of barre,
Or breke it at a renning with his hede.
His berd as any sowe or fox was rede,
And therto brode, as though it were a spade.
Upon the cop right of his nose he hade
A wert, and thereon stode a tufte of heres,
Rede as the bristles of a sowes eres :
His nose-thirles blacke were and wide.
A swerd and bokeler bare he by his side.
His mouth as wide was as a forneis,
He was a j angler and a goliardeis,
And that was most of sinne, and harlotries.
Wel coude he stelen corne and tollen thries.
And yet he had a thomb of gold parde.
A white cote and a blew hode wered he.
A baggepipe wel coude he blowe and soune,
And therwithall he brought us out of toune." l

Those are the athletic forms, the square build, the
jolly John Bulls of the period, such as we yet find them,
nourished by meat and porter, sustained by bodily ex-
ercise and boxing. These are the men we must keep
before us, if we will understand how political liberty

1 Prologue to the Canterbury TeUes, ii p. 17, I 647.

U4 THE SOURCE. BOOK i.

has been established in this country. Gradually they
find the simple knights, their colleagues in the county
court, too poor to be present with the great barons at
the royal assemblies, coalescing with them. They be-
come united by community of interests, by similarity of
t manners, by nearness of condition ; they take them for
their representatives, they elect them.1 They have now
entered upon public life, and the advent of a new rein-
forcement, gives them a perpetual standing in their
changed condition. The towns laid waste by the Con-
quest are gradually repeopled. They obtain or exact
charters ; the townsmen buy themselves out of the
arbitrary taxes that were imposed on them ; they get
possession of the land on which their houses are built ;
they unite themselves under mayors and aldermen.
Each town now, within the meshes of the great feudal
net, is a power. The Earl of Leicester, rebelling against
the king, summons two burgesses from each town to
Parliament,2 to authorise and support him. From that
time the conquered race, both in country and town, rose
to political life. If they were taxed, it was with their
consent ; they paid nothing which they did not agree
to. Early in the fourteenth century their united depu-
ties composed the House of Commons ; and already, at
the close of the preceding century, the Archbishop of
Canterbury, speaking in the name of the king, said to
the pope, " It is the custom of the kingdom of England,
that in all affairs relating to the state of this kingdom,
the advice of all who are interested in them should be
taken."

1 From 1214, and also in 1225 and 1254. Gukot, Origin of tfa
Representative System in England, pp. 297-299.
~* In 1264.

CHAP. ii. THE NORMANS. 145

VII.

If they have acquired liberties, it is because they
have obtained them by force; circumstances have
assisted, but character has done more. The protection
of the great barons and the alliance of the plain knights
have strengthened them ; but it was by their native
roughness and energy that they maintained their inde-
pendence. Look at the contrast they offer at this
moment to their neighbours. What occupies the mind
of the French people ? The fabliaux, the naughty tricks
of Eeynard, the art of deceiving Master Isengrin, of
stealing his wife, of cheating him out of his dinner, of
getting him beaten by a third party without danger to
one's self ; in short, the triumph of poverty and clever-
ness over power united to folly. The popular hero is
already the artful plebeian, chaffing, light-hearted, who,
later on, will ripen into Panurge and Figaro, not apt to
withstand you to your face, too sharp to care for great
victories and habits of strife, inclined by the nimbleness
of his wit to dodge round an obstacle ; if he but touch
a man with the tip of his finger, that man tumbles into
the trap. But here we have other customs : it is Eobin
Hood, a valiant outlaw, living free and bold in the green
forest, waging frank and open war against sheriff and
law.1 If ever a man was popular in his country, it
was he. " It is he," says an old historian, " whom the
common people love so dearly to celebrate in games
and comedies, and whose history, an Tig by fiddlers, inte-
rests them more than any other." In the sixteenth
century he still had his commemoration day, observed
by all the people in the small towns and in the country.
Bishop Latimer, making his pastoral tour, announced

1 Aug. Thierry, iv. 56. Ritson's Robin Hood, 1832.
VOL. I. L

146 THE SOURCE. BOOK i

one day that he would preach in a certain place. On
the morrow, proceeding to the church, he found the
doors closed, and waited more than an hour before they
brought him the key. At last a man came and said to
him, " Syr, thys ys a busye day with us ; we cannot
heare you : it is Robyn Hoodes Daye. The parishe
are gone abrode to gather for Robyn Hoode. ... I was
fayne there to geve place to Robyn Hoode." 1 The
bishop was obliged to divest himself of his ecclesiasti-
cal garments and proceed on his journey, leaving his
place to archers dressed in green, who played on a
rustic stage the parts of Robin Hood, Little John, and
their band. In fact, he was the national hero. Saxon
in the first place, and waging war against the men of
law, against bishops and archbishops, whose sway was
so heavy; generous, moreover, giving to a poor ruined
knight clothes, horse, and money to buy back the land
he had pledged to a rapacious abbot ; compassionate too,
and kind to the poor, enjoining his men not to injure
yeomen and labourers ; but above all rash, bold, proud,
who would go and draw his bow before the sheriffs eyes
and to his face ; ready with blows, whether to give or
take. He slew fourteen out of fifteen foresters who
came to arrest him ; he slays the sheriff, the judge, the
town gatekeeper; he is ready to slay as many more as
like to come; and all this joyously, jovially, like an
honest fellow who eats well, has a hard skin, lives in
the open air, and revels in animal life.

" In somer when the shawes be sheyne,

And leves be large and long,
Hit is fulle mery in feyre foreste

To here the foulys song."
4 Latinier's Serm&ns, ed. Arber, 6th Sermon, 1869, p. 173.

CHAP. n. THE NORMANS: u?

That is how many ballads begin ; and the fine weather,
which makes the stags and oxen butt with their horns,
inspires them with the thought of exchanging blows
with sword or stick. Eobin dreamed that two yeomen
were thrashing him, and he wants to go and find them,
angrily repelling Little John, who offers to go first :

" Ah John, by me thou settest noe store,

And that I farley finde :
How offt send I my men before,
And tarry myselfe behinde ?

" It is no cunnin a knave to ken,

An a man but heare him speake ,
An it were not for bursting of my bowe,
John, I thy head wold breake." 1. . .

He goes alone, and meets the robust yeoman, Guy oi
Gisborne :

" He that had neyther beene kythe nor kin,

Might have seen a full fayre fight,
To see how together these yeomen went
With blades both browne and bright,

" To see how these yeomen together they fought

Two howres of a summer's day ;
Yett neither Robin Hood nor sir Guy
Them fettled to flye away." 2

You see Guy the yeoman is as brave as Robin Hood ;
he came to seek him in the wood, and drew the bow
almost as well as he. This old popular poetry is not
the praise of a single bandit, but of an entire class, the
yeomanry. " God haffe mersey on Robin Hodys solle,

1 Riteou, Robin Hood Ballads, L iv. v. 41-48.
2 Ibid. v. 145-152.

148 THE SOURCE. BOOK i

and saffe all god yemanry." That is how many ballads
end. The brave yeoman, inured to blows, a good archer,
clever at sword and stick, is the favourite. There were
also redoubtable, armed townsfolk, accustomed to make
use of their arms. Here they are at work :

" ' 0 that were a shame/ said jolly Robin,
' We being three, and thou but one/
The pinder1 leapt back then thirty good foot,
'Twas thirty good foot and one.

" He leaned his back fast unto a thorn,

And his foot against a stone,
And there he fought a long summer's day,
A summer's day so long.

" Till that their swords on their broad bucklers
Were broke fast into their hands." 2

Often even Robin does not get the advantage :

" ' I pass not for length," bold Arthur reply'd,

' My staff is of oke so free ;
Eight foot and a half, it will knock down a calf,
And I hope it will knock down thee.'

" Then Robin could no longer forbear,

He gave him such a knock,
Quickly and soon the blood came down
Before it was ten a clock.

" Then Arthur he soon recovered himself,

And gave him such a knock on the crown,
That from every side of bold Robin Hood's head
The blood came trickling down.

1 A pinder 's task was to pin the sheep in the fold, cattle in the pen-
fold or pound (Richardson). — TR.
a Ritson, ii. 3, v. 17-26.

OHAP. ii. THE NORMANS. 149

" Then Robin raged like a wild boar,

As soon as he saw his own blood :
Then Bland was in hast, he laid on so fast,
As though he had been cleaving of wood.

" And about and about and about they went,

Like two wild bores in a chase,
Striving to aim each other to maim,
Leg, arm, or any other place.

•
" And knock for knock they lustily dealt,

Which held for two hours and more,
Till all the wood rang at every bang,
They ply'd their work so sore.

" ' Hold thy hand, hold thy hand,' said Robin Hood,

Ajid let thy quarrel fall ;
For here we may thrash our bones all to mesh,
And get no coyn at all.

" ' And in the forrest of merry Sherwood,

Hereafter thou shalt be free.'
' God a mercy for nought, my freedom I bought,
I may thank my staff, and not thee.' " 1 . .

" Who are you, then ? " says Robin :

" ' I am a tanner,' bold Arthur reply'd,

' In Nottingham long I have wrought ;
Ajid if thou'lt come there, I vow and swear,
I will tan thy hide for nought.' "

" ' God a mercy, good fellow,' said jolly Robin,

' Since thou art so kind and free ;
And if thou wilt tan my hide for nought,
I will do as much for thee.' " 2

» Riteon, ii. 6, v. 58-89. 2 Ibid. v. 94-101.

150 THE SOURCE. BOOK L

With these generous offers, they embrace ; a free ex-
change of honest blows always prepares the way for
friendship. It was so Robin Hood tried Little John,
whom he loved all his life after. Little John was
seven feet high, and being on a bridge, would not give
way. Honest Robin would not use his bow against
him, but went and cut a stick seven feet long; and
they agreed amicably to fight on the bridge until one
should fall into the water. They fall to so merrily
that "their bones ring." In the end Robin falls,
and he feels only the more respect for Little John.
Another time, having a sword with him, he was thrashed
by a tinker who had only a stick. Full of admiration,
he gives him a hundred pounds. Again he was thrashed
by a potter, who refused him toll ; then by a shepherd.
They fight to wile away time. Even now-a-days boxers
give each other a friendly grip before setting to ; they
knock one another about in this country honourably,
without malice, fury, or shame. Broken teeth, black
eyes, smashed ribs, do not call for murderous vengeance :
it would seem that the bones are more solid and the
nerves less sensitive in England than elsewhere. Blows
once exchanged, they take each other by the hand, and
dance together on the green grass ;

" Then Robin took them both by the hands,
And danc'd round about the oke tree.

* For three merry men, and three merry men,
And three merry men we be.' "

Moreover, these people, in each parish, practised the
bow every Sunday, and were the best archers in the
world; from the close of the fourteenth century
the general emancipation of the villeins multiplied

CHAP. ii. THE NORMANS. 151

their number greatly, and you can now understand
how, amidst all the operations and changes of the great
central powers, the liberty of the subject survived.
After all, the only permanent and unalterable guarantee,
in every country and under every constitution, is this
unspoken declaration in the heart of the mass of the
people, which is well understood on all sides : " If any
man touches my property, enters my house, obstructs or
molests me, let him beware. I have patience, but I
have also strong arms, good comrades, a good blade, and,
on occasion, a firm resolve, happen what may, to plunge
my blade up to its hilt in his throat."

VIII.

Thus thought Sir John Fortescue, Chancellor of England
under Henry VI., exiled in France during the Wars of
the Roses, one of the oldest prose-writers, and the first
who weighed and explained the constitution of his
country.1 He says :

" It is cowardise and lack of hartes and corage that kepeth
the Frenchmen from rysyng, and not povertye ; 2 which corage
no Frenche man hath like to the English man. It hath ben
often seen in Englond that iij or iv thefes, for povertie, hath
sett upon vij or viij true men, and robbyd them al. But it
hath not ben seen in Fraunce, that vij or viij thefes have ben
hardy to robbe iij or iv true men. Wherfor it is right seld
that Frenchmen be hangyd for robberye. for that they have no
hertys to do so terryble an acte. There be therfor mo men

1 The, Difference between an Absolute and limited Monarchy — A
learned Commendation of the Politic Laws of England (Latin). I fre-
quently quote from the second work, which is more full and complete.

2 The courage which finds utterance here is coarse ; the English
instincts are combative and independent. The French race, and the
Gauls generally, are perhaps the most reckless of life of any.

152 THE SOURCE. BOOK i

hangyd in Englond, in a yere, for robberye and manslaughter,
than ther be hangid in Fraunce for such cause of crime in vij
yers."1

This throws a startling and terrible light on the violent
condition of this armed community, where sudden
attacks are an everyday matter, and every one, rich and
poor, lives with his hand on his sword. There were
great bands of malefactors under Edward I., who infested
the country, and fought with those who came to seize
them. The inhabitants of the towns were obliged to
gather together with those of the neighbouring towns,
with hue and cry, to pursue and capture them. Under
Edward III. there were barons who rode about with
armed escorts and archers, seizing the manors, carrying
off ladies and girls of high degree, mutilating, Trilling,
extorting ransoms from people in their own houses, as
if they were in an enemy's land, and sometimes coming
before the judges at the sessions in such guise and in
so great force that the judges were afraid and dared not
administer justice.2 Read the letters of the Paston
family, under Henry VI. and Edward IV., and you will
see how private war was at every door, how it was
necessary for a man to provide himself with men and
arms, to be on the alert for defence of his property, to be
self-reliant, to depend on his own strength and courage.
It is this excess of vigour and readiness to fight which,
after their victories in France, set them against one
another in England, in the butcheries of the Wars of

1 The Difference, etc., 3d ed. 1724, ch. xiii. p. 98. There are now-a-
days in France 42_ highway rohheries as against 738 in England. In
1843, there were in England four times as many accusations of crimes
and offences as in France, having regard to the number of inhabitant*
(Moreau de Jonnes).

8 Statute of Winchester, 1285 ; Ordinance of 1378.

CHAP. ii. THE NORMANS. 153

the Eoses. The strangers who saw them were astonished
at their bodily strength and courage, at the great pieces
of beef " which feed their muscles, at their military
habits, their fierce obstinacy, as of savage beasts."1
They are like their bulldogs, an untameable race, who
in their mad courage " cast themselves with shut eyes
into the den of a Eussian bear, and get their head
broken like a rotten apple." This strange condition of
a militant community, so full of danger, and requiring
so much effort, does not make them afraid. King
Edward having given orders to send disturbers of the
peace to prison without legal proceedings, and not to
liberate them, on bail or otherwise, the Commons
declared the order "horribly vexatious;" resist it, re-
fuse to be too much protected. Less peace, but more
independence. They maintain the guarantees of the
subject at the expense of public security, and prefer
turbulent liberty to arbitrary order. Better suffer
marauders whom they could fight, than magistrates under
whom they would have to bend.

This proud and persistent notion gives rise to, and
fashions Fortescue's whole work :

" Ther be two kynds of kyngdomys, of the which that one ys a
lordship callid in Latyne Dominium regale, and that other is
callid Dominium politicum et regale."

The first is established in France, and the second in
England.

" And they dyversen in that the first may rule his people by
such lawys as he makyth hymself, and therefor, he may set upon
them talys, and other impositions, such as he wyl hymself, with-

1 Benvenuto Cellini, quoted by Fronde, i. 20, Hist, of Englcmd.
Shakspeare, Henry V. : conversation of French lords before the battk
of Agincourt.

154 THE SOURCE. BOOK i.

out their assent. The secuiid may not rule hys people by other
laws than such as they assenten unto ; and therfor he may set
upon them non impositions without their own assent." l

In a state like this, the will of the people is the prime
element of life. Sir John Fortescue says further :

" A king of England cannot at his pleasure make any altera-
tions in the laws of the land, for the nature of his government
is not only regal, but political."

" In the body politic, the first thing which lives and moves
is the intention of the people, having in it the blood, that is,
the prudential care and provision for the public good, which it
transmits and communicates to the head, as to the principal
part, and to all the rest of the members of the said body politic,
whereby it subsists and is invigorated. The law under which
the people is incorporated may be compared to the nerves or
sinews of the body natural. . . . And as the bones and all
the other members of the body preserve their functions and dis-
charge their several offices by the nerves, so do the members of
the community by the law. And as the head of the body
natural cannot change its nerves or sinews, cannot deny to the
several parts their proper energy, their due proportion and ali-
ment of blood, neither can a king who is the head of the body
politic change the laws thereof, nor take from the people what
is theirs by right, against their consents. . . . For he is
appointed to protect his subjects in their lives, properties, and
laws, for this very end and purpose he has the delegation of
power from the people."

Here we have all the ideas of Locke in the fifteenth
century ; so powerful is practice to suggest theory I so
quickly does man discover, in the enjoyment of liberty,
the nature of liberty ! Fortescue goes further ; he con-
trasts, step by step, the Eoman law, that inheritance of all

1 The Difference, etc., p. i.

CHAP. ii. THE NOKMA.N!$. 155

Latin peoples, with the English law, that heritage of all
Teutonic peoples : one the work of absolute princes, and
tending altogether to the sacrifice of the individual ;
the other the work of the common will, tending
altogether to protect the person. He contrasts the
maxims of the imperial jurisconsults, who accord "force
of law to all which is determined by the prince," with
the statutes of England, which " are not enacted by the
sole will of the prince, . . . but with the concurrent
consent of the whole kingdom, by their representatives
in Parliament, . . . more than three hundred select
persons." He contrasts the arbitrary nomination of
imperial officers with the election of the sheriff, and
says:

" There is in every county a certain officer, called the king's
sheriff, who, amongst other duties of his office, executes within
his county all mandates and judgments of the king's courts of
justice : he is an annual officer ; and it is not lawful for him,
after the expiration of his year, to continue to act in his said
office, neither shall he be taken in again to execute the said
office within two years thence next ensuing. The manner of
his election is thus : Every year, on the morrow of All-Souls,
there meet in the King's Court of Exchequer all the king's
counsellors, as well lords spiritual and temporal, as all other the
king's justices, all the barons of the Exchequer, the Master of
the Rolls, and certain other officers, when all of them, by com-
mon consent, nominate three of every county knights or esquires,
persons of distinction, and such as they esteem fittest qualified
to bear the office of sheriff of that county for the year ensuing.
The king only makes choice of one out of the three so nominated
and returned, who, in virtue of the king's letters patent, is con-
stituted High Sheriff of that county."

He contrasts the Roman procedure, which is satislied

156 THE SOURCE. BOOK i.

with two witnesses to condemn a man, with the jury,
the three permitted challenges, the admirable guarantees
of justice with which the uprightness, number, repute,
and condition of the juries surround the sentence.
About the juries he says :

" Twelve good and true men being sworn, as in the manner
above related, legally qualified, that is, having, over and besides
their moveables, possessions in land sufficient, as was said,
wherewith to maintain their rank and station -} neither inspected
by, nor at variance with either of the parties ; all of the neigh-
bourhood ; there shall be read to them, in English, by the
Court, the record and nature of the plea." l

Thus protected, the English commons cannot be other
than flourishing. Consider, on the other hand, he says
to the young prince whom he is instructing, the condi-
tion of the commons in France. By their taxes, tax on
salt, on wine, billeting of soldiers, they are reduced to
great misery. You have seen them on your travels. . . .

" The same Commons be so impoverishid and distroyyd, that
they may unneth lyve. Thay drink water, thay eate apples,
with bred right brown made of rye. They eate no fleshe, but
if it be selden, a litill larde, or of the entrails or beds of bests
sclayne for the nobles and merchants of the land. They weryn
no wollyn, but if it be a pore cote under their uttermost garment,
made of grete canvass, and cal it a frok. Their hosyn be of
like canvas, and passen not their knee, wherfor they be gartrid
and their thyghs bare. Their wifs and children gone bare fote.

1 The original of this very famous treatise, de Laudibus Legum
Anglice, was written in Latin between 1464 and 1470, first published in
1537, and translated into English in 1775 by Francis Gregor. I have
taken these extracts from the magnificent edition of Sir John Fortescue'a
works published in 1869 for private distribution, and edited by Thomas
Fortescue, Lord Clermont. Some of the pieces quoted, left in the old
spelling, are taken from an older edition, translated by Robert Mulcastei
in 1567.— TB.

CHAP. u. THE NORMANS. 157

. . . For sum of them, that was wonte to pay to his lord for his
tenement which he hyrith by the year a scute payth now to the
kyng, over that scute, fyve skuts. Wher thrugh they be artyd
by necessite so to watch, labour and grub in the ground for their
sustenance, that their nature is much wasted, and the kynd of
them brought to nowght. Thay gone crokyd and ar feeble, not
able to fight nor to defend the realm ; nor they have wepon, nor
monye to buy them wepon withal. . . . This is the frute first
of hyre Jus regale. . . . But blessed be God, this land ys rulid
under a better lawe, and therfor the people therof be not in such
penurye, nor therby hurt in their persons, but they be wealthie
and have all things necessarie to the sustenance of nature.
Wherefore they be myghty and able to resyste the adversaries
of the realms that do or will do them wrong. Loo, this is the
frut of Jus politicum et regale, under which we lyve." l " Everye
inhabiter of the realme of England useth and enjoyeth at his
pleasure all the fruites that his land or cattel beareth, with al
the profits and commodities which by his owne travayle, or by
the labour of others, hae gaineth ; not hindered by the iniurie
or wrong deteinement of anye man, but that hee shall bee
allowed a reasonable recompence.2 . . . Hereby it commeth to
passe that the men of that lande are riche, havyng aboundaunce
of golde and silver, and other thinges necessarie for the main-
tenaunce of man's life. They drinke no water, unless it be so,
that some for devotion, and uppon a zeale of penaunce, doe ab-
staine from other drinks. They eate plentifully of all kindes of
fleshe and fishe. They weare fine woollen cloth in all their
apparel ; they have also aboundaunce of bed-coveringes in their
houses, and of all other woollen stufie. They have greate store
of all hustlementes and implementes of householde, they are
plentifully furnished with al instruments of husbandry, and all
other things that are requisite to the accomplishment of a quiet
and wealthy lyfe, according to their estates and degrees. Neither

1 Of an Absolute and Limited Monarchy, 3d ed., 1724, ch. iii. p. 16.
1 Commines bears the same testimony.

158 THE SOURCE. BOOK L

ire they sued in the lawe, but onely before ordinary iudges,
where by the lawes of the lande they are iustly intreated.
Neither are they arrested or impleaded for their moveables 01
possessions, or arraigned of any offence, bee it never so great and
outragious, but after the lawes of the land, and before the iudges
aforesaid."1

All this arises from the constitution of the country
and the distribution of the land. Whilst in other
countries we find only a population of paupers, with
here and there a few lords, England is covered and filled
with owners of lands and fields ; so that " therein so
small a thorpe cannot bee founde, wherein dwelleth not
a knight, an esquire, or suche a housholder as is there
commonly called a franklayne, enryched with greate
possessions. And also other freeholders, and many yeo-
men able for their livelodes to make a jurye in fourme
afore-mentioned. For there bee in that lande divers
yeomen, which are able to dispend by the yeare above
a hundred poundes." 2 Harrison says : 3

1 De Laudibus, etc., ch. xxxvi.

2 " The might of the realme most stondyth upon archers which be
not rich men." Compare Hallam, ii. 482. All this takes us hack as
far as the Conquest, and farther. " It is reasonable to suppose that the
greater part of those who appear to have possessed small freeholds or
parcels of manors were no other than the original nation. ... A
respectable class of free socagers, having in general full right of alien-
ating their lands, and holding them probably at a small certain rent
from the lord of the manor, frequently occurs in the Domesday Book."
At all events, there were in Domesday Book Saxons " perfectly exempt
from villenage." This class is mentioned with respect in the treatises
of Glanvil and Bracton. As for the villeins, they were quickly liber-
ated in the thirteenth or fourteenth century, either by their own energies
or by becoming copyholders. The Wars of the Roses still further
raised the commons ; orders were frequently issued, previous to a battle,
to slay the nobles and spare the commoners.

* Description of England, 275.

CHAP. ii. THE NORMANS. 159

"This sort of people, have more estimation than labourers
and the common sort of artificers, and these commonlie live
wealthilie, keepe good houses, and travell to get riches. They
are for the most part farmers to gentlemen," and keep servants
of their own. " These were they that in times past made all
France afraid. And albeit they be not called master, as gentle-
men are, or sir, as to knights apperteineth, but onelie John and
Thomas, etc., yet have they beene found to have done verie good
service; and the kings of England, in foughten battels, were
wont to remaine among them (who were their footmen) as the
French kings did among their horssemen : the prince thereby
showing where his chiefe strength did consist."

Such men, says Fortescue, might form a legal jury, and
vote, resist, be associated, do everything wherein a free
government consists : for they were numerous in every
district; they were not down-trodden like the timid
peasants of France ; they had their honour and that of
their family to maintain ; " they he well provided with
arms ; they remember that they have won battles in
France." l Such is the class, still obscure, but more

1 The following is a portrait of a yeoman, by Latimer, in the first
sermon preached before; Edward VI., 8th March 1549 : " My father was
a yeoman, and had no lands of his own ; only he had a farm of £3 or
£4 by year at the uttermost, and hereupon he tilled so much as kept
half-a-dozen men. He had walk for a hundred sheep, and my mother
milked thirty kine. He was able, and did find the king a harness, with
himself and his horse ; while he came to the place that he should
receive the king's wages. 1 can remember that I buckled his harness
when he went unto Blackheatk field. He kept me to school, or else I
had not been able to have preached before the King's Majesty now.
He married my sisters with £5 or 20 nobles a-piece, so that he brought
them up in godliness and fear of God ; he kept hospitality for his poor
neighbours, and some alms he gave to the poor ; and all this did he of
the said farm. Where he that now hath it payeth £16 by the year, or
more, and is not able to do anything for his prince, for himself, nor for
his children, or give a cup of drink to the poor. "

This is from the sixth sermon, preached before the young king, 12tb

160 THE SOURCE. BOOK i

rich and powerful every century, which, founded by the
down-trodden Saxon aristocracy, and sustained by the
surviving Saxon character, ended, under the lead of the
inferior Norman nobility, and under the patronage of
the superior Norman nobility, in establishing and settling
a free constitution, and a nation worthy of liberty.

IX.

When, as here, men are endowed with a serious
character, have a resolute spirit, and possess independent
habits, they deal with their conscience as with their
daily business, and end by laying hands on church
as well as state. Already for a long time the ex-
actions of the Roman See had provoked the resistance
of the people, l and the higher clergy became unpopular.
Men complained that the best livings were given by
the Pope to non-resident strangers ; that some Italian,
unknown in England, possessed fifty or sixty benefices
in England ; that English money poured into Rome ;
and that the clergy, being judged only by clergy, gave
themselves up to their vices, and abused their state
of immunity. In the first years of Henry IIL's reign
there were nearly a hundred murders committed by
priests then alive. At the "beginning of the four-
teenth century the ecclesiastical revenue was twelve

April 1549 : "In my time my poor father was as diligent to teach me
to shoot as to learn (me) any other thing ; and so, I think, other men
did their children. He taught me how to draw, how to lay my body
in my bow, and not to draw with strength of arms, as other nations do,
but with strength of the body. I had my bows bought me according
to my age and strength ; as I increased in them, so my bows were
made bigger and bigger ; for men shall never shoot well except they be
brought up in it. It is a goodly art, a wholesome kind of exercise, and
much commended in physic."

1 In 1246, 1376. Thierry, iii. 79.

CHAP. ii. THE NORMANS. 161

times greater than the civil ; about half the soil was in
the hands of the clergy. At the end of the century the
commons declared that the taxes paid to the church
were five times greater than the taxes paid to the crown ;
and some years afterwards,1 considering that the wealth
of the clergy only served to keep them in idleness and
luxury, they proposed to confiscate it for the public bene-
fit. Already the idea of the Reformation had forced
itself upon them. They remembered how in the ballads
Robin Hood ordered his folk to spare the yeomen,
labourers, even knights, if they are good fellows, but
never to let abbots or bishops escape. The prelates
were grievously oppressing the people by means of their
privileges, ecclesiastical courts, and tithes ; when sud-
denly, amid the pleasant banter or the monotonous
babble of the Norman versifiers, we hear the indignant
voice of a Saxon, a man of the people and a victim of
oppression, thundering against them.

It is the vision of Piers Ploughman, written, it is
supposed, by a secular priest of Oxford.2 Doubtless
the traces of French taste are perceptible. It could
not be otherwise : the people from below can never
quite prevent themselves from imitating the people
above ; and the most unshackled popular poets, Burns
and B^ranger, too often preserve an academic style. So
here a fashionable machinery, the allegory of the Eoman
de la Rose, is pressed into service. We have Do-well,
Covetousness, Avarice, Simony, Conscience, and a whole
world of talking abstractions. But, in spite of these

1 1404-1409. The commons declared that with these revenues the
king would be able to maintain 15 earls, 1500 knights, 6200 squires,
and 100 hospitals : each earl receiving annually 300 marks ; each knight
100 marks, and the produce of four ploughed lands ; each squire 40
marks, and the produce of two ploughed lands. 2 About 1362.

VOL. I. M

162 THE SOURCE. BOOK L

vain foreign phantoms, the body of the poem is national;
and true to life. The old language reappears in part ; the
old metre altogether, no more rhymes, but barbarous
alliterations; no more jesting, but a harsh gravity, a
sustained invective, a grand and sombre imagination,
heavy Latin texts, hammered down as by a Protestant
hand. Piers Ploughman went to sleep on the Malvern
hills, and there had a wonderful dream :

" Thanne gan I meten — a merveillous swevene,
That I was in a wildernesse — wiste I nevere where ;
And as I biheeld into the eest, — an heigh to the sonne,
I seigh a tour on a toft, — trieliche y-maked,
A deep dale bynethe — a dongeon thereinue
With depe diches and derke — and dredfulle of sighte.
A fair feeld ful of folk— fond I ther bitwene,
Of alle manere of men, — the meene and the riche,
Werchynge and wandrynge — as the world asketh.
Some putten hein to the plough, — pleiden ful selde,
In settynge and sowynge — swonken ful harde,
And wonnen that wastours — with glotonye dystruyeth." l

A gloomy picture of the world, like the frightful dreams
which occur so often in Albert Durer and Luther. The
first reformers were persuaded that the earth was given
over to evil ; that the devil had on it his empire and
his officers; that Antichrist, seated on the throne of
Eome, displayed ecclesiastical pomps to seduce souls
and cast them into the fire of hell. So here Antichrist,
with raised banner, enters a convent; bells are rung;
monks in solemn procession go to meet him, and receive
with congratulations their lord and father.2 With seven

1 Piers Plwglimaris Visivn, and Creed, ed. T. Wright, 1856, i. p.
2, L 21-44.

2 The Archdeacon of Richmond, on his tour in 1216, came to the
priory of Bridlington with ninety-seven horses, twenty-one dogs, and
three falcons.

cmxp. n THE NORMANS. 163

great giants, the seven deadly sins, he besieges Con-
science; and the assault is led by Idleness, who brings
with her an army of more than a thousand prelates :
for vices reign, more hateful from being in holy places,
and employed in the church of God in the devil's service :

" Ac now is Religion a rydere — a romere aboute,
A ledere of love-dayes — and a lond-buggere,
A prikere on a palfrey — fro manere to manere. . . .
And but if his knave knele — that shal his coppe brynge,
He loureth on hym, and asketh hym — who taughte hym
curteisie."1

But this sacrilegious show has its day, and God puts
His hand on men in order to warn them. By order of
Conscience, Nature sends forth a host of plagues and
diseases from the planets :

" Kynde Conscience tho herde, — and cam out of the planetes,
And sente forth his forreyours — feveres and fluxes,
Coughes and cardiacles, — crampes and tooth-aches,
Reumes and radegundes, — and roynous scabbes,
Biles and bocches, — and brennynge agues,
Frenesies and foule yveles, — forageres of kynde. . . .
There was ' Harrow ! and Help ! — Here cometh Kynde !
With Deeth that is dredful — tq undo us alle !'
The lord that lyved after lust — tho aloud cryde. . . .
Deeth cam dryvynge after, — and al to duste passhed
Kynges and knyghtes, — kaysers and popes, . '. -'J^f
Manye a lovely lady — and lemmans of knyghtes,
Swowned and swelted for sorwe of hise dyntes."2

Here is a crowd of miseries, like those which Milton
has described in his vision of human life ; tragic pictures

1 Piers Ploughman's Visivn, i. p. 191, I. 6217-6228.
2 Ibid. ii. Last book, p. 430, I. 14,084-14,135.

164 THE SOURCE. BOOK i,

and emotions, such as the reformers delight to dwell upon.
There is a like speech delivered by John Knox, before
the fair ladies of Mary Stuart, which tears the veil from
the human corpse just as coarsely, in order to exhibit its
shame. The conception of the world, proper to the people
of the north, all sad and moral, shows itself already.
They are never comfortable in their country; they have
to strive continually against cold or rain. They cannot
live there carelessly, lying under a lovely sky, in a sultry
and clear atmosphere, their eyes filled with the noble
beauty and happy serenity of the land. They must work
to live ; be attentive, exact, keep their houses wind and
water tight, trudge doggedly through the mud behind their
plough, light their lamps in their shops during the day.
Their climate imposes endless inconvenience, and exacts
endless endurance. Hence arise melancholy and the
idea of duty. Man naturally thinks of life as of a battle,
oftener of black death which closes this deadly show,
and leads so many plumed and disorderly processions to
the silence and the eternity of the grave. All this
visible world is vain ; there is nothing true but human
virtue, — the courageous energy with which man attains
to self-command, the generous energy with which he
employs himself in the service of others. On this view,
then, his eyes are fixed ; they pierce through worldly
gauds, neglect sensual joys, to attain this. By such inner
thoughts and feelings the ideal model is displaced ; a
new source of action springs up — the idea of righteous-
ness. What sets them against ecclesiastical pomp and
insolence, is neither the envy of the poor and low, nor
the anger of the oppressed, nor a revolutionary desire to
experimentalise abstract truth, but conscience. They
tremble lest they should not work out their salvation if

CHAP. IL THE NOEMANS. 165

they continue in a corrupt church ; they fear the menaces
of God, and dare not embark on the great journey with
unsafe guides. " What is righteousness ? " asked Luther
anxiously, " and how shall I obtain it ? " With like
anxiety Piers Ploughman goes to seek Do-well, and asks
each one to show him where he shall find him. " With
us," say the friars. " Contra quath ich, Septies in die
cadit Justus, and ho so syngeth certys doth nat wel ; "
so he betakes himself to " study and writing," like
Luther; the clerks at table speak much of God and of
the Trinity, "and taken Bernarde to witnesse, and
putteth forth presompcions . . . ac the earful mai crie
and quaken atte gate, bothe a fyngred and a furst, and
for defaute spille ys non so hende to have hym yn.
Clerkus and knyghtes carpen of God ofte, and haveth
hym muche' in hure mouthe, ac mene men in herte ;"
and heart, inner faith, living virtue, are what constitute
true religion. This is what these dull Saxons had
begun to discover. The Teutonic conscience, and English
good sense too, had been aroused, as well as individual
energy, the resolution to judge and to decide alone, by
and for one's self. " Christ is our hede that sitteth on
hie, Heddis ne ought we have no mo," says a poem,
attributed to Chaucer, and which, with others, claims
independence for Christian consciences.1
" We ben his membres bothe also,

Father he taught us call hi in all,

Maisters to call forbad he tho ;

Al maisters ben wickid and fals."

No other mediator between man and God. In vain the
doctors state that they have authority for their words ;

1 Piers Plowman's Grede ; the Ploivman's Tale, first printed iii 1550.
There were three editions in one year, it was so manifestly Protestant

166 THE SOURCE. BOOK i.

there is a word of greater authority, to wit, God's. We
hear it in the fourteenth century, this grand " word of
God." It quitted the learned schools, the dead lan-
guages, the dusty shelves on which the clergy suffered
it to sleep, covered with a confusion of commentators
and Fathers.1 Wiclif appeared and translated it like
Luther, and in a spirit similar to Luther's. " Cristen
men and wymmen, olde and yonge, shulden studie
fast in the Newe Testament, for it is of ful autorite, and
opyn to undirstonding of simple men, as to the poyntis
that be moost nedeful to salvacioun." 2 Religion must
be secular, in order to escape from the hands of the
clergy, who monopolise it; each must hear and read
for himself the word of God : he will then be sure that
it has not been corrupted ; he will feel it better, and
more, he will understand it better ; for

" ech place of holy writ, both opyn and derk, techith inekenes
and charite ; and therfore he that kepith mekenes and charite
hath the trewe undirstondyng and perfectioun of al holi writ. . . .
Therfore no simple man of wit be aferd unmesurabli to studie in
the text of holy writ . . . and no clerk be proude of the verrey
undirstondyng of holy writ, for whi undirstonding of hooly writ
with outen charite that kepith Goddis heestis, makith a man
depper dampned . . . and pride and covetise of clerkis is cause
of her blindees and eresie, and priveth them fro verrey undir-
etondyng of holy writ." 3

1 Knighton, about 1400, wrote thus of Wiclif: "Transtulit de
Latino in anglicam linguam, non angelicam. Unde per ipsum fit vul-
gare, et magis apertum laicis et mulieribus legere scientibus quam solet
esse clericis admodum litteratis, et bene intelligentibus. Et sic evan-
gelica margerita spargitur et a porcis conculcatur . . . (ita) ut laicin
commune seternum quod ante fuerat clericis et ecclesias doctoribus
talentum supernum."

8 Wiclif s Bible, ed. Forshall and Madden, 1850, preface to Oxford
edition, p. 2, s Ibid.

CHAP. ii. THE NORMANS. 167

These are the memorable words that began to circu-
late in the markets and in the schools. They read the
translated Bible, and commented on it; they judged
the existing Church after it. What judgments these
serious and untainted minds passed upon it, with what
readiness they pushed on to the true religion of their
race, we may see from their petition to Parliament.1
One hundred and thirty years before Luther, they said
that the pope was not established by Christ, that pilgri-
mages and image-worship were akin to idolatry, that
external rites are of no importance, that priests ought
not to possess temporal wealth, that the doctrine of
transubstantiation made a people idolatrous, that priests
have not the power of absolving from sin. In proof of
all this they brought forward texts of Scripture. Fancy
these brave spirits, simple and strong souls, who began
to read at night in their shops, by candle-light ; for
they were shopkeepers — tailors, skinners, and bakers
— who, with some men of letters, began to read, and
then to believe, and finally got themselves burned.2
What a sight for the fifteenth century, and what a
promise ! It seems as though, with liberty of action,
liberty of mind begins to appear; that these common
folk will think and speak ; that under the conventional
literature, imitated from France, a new literature is
dawning ; and that England, genuine England, half-mute
since the Conquest, will at last find a voice.

She had not yet found it. King and peers ally
themselves to the Church, pass terrible statutes, destroy
books, burn heretics alive, often with refinement of
torture, — one in a barrel, another hung by an iron chain

1 In 1395.
3 1401, William Sawtre, the first Lollard burned alive.

168 THE SOURCE. BOOK i

round his waist. The temporal wealth of the clergy
had been attacked, and therewith the whole English
constitution ; and the great establishment above crushed
out with its whole weight the revolutionists from below.
Darkly, in silence, while the nobles were destroying each
other in the Wars of the Roses, the commons went on
working and living, separating themselves from the
established Church, maintaining their liberties, amassing
wealth, but not going further.1 Like a vast rock
which underlies the soil, yet crops up here and there at
distant intervals, they barely show themselves. No
great poetical or religious work displays them to the
light. They sang; but their ballads, first ignored,
then transformed, reach us only in a late edition.
They prayed ; but beyond one or two indifferent
poems, their incomplete and repressed doctrine bore no
fruit. We may well see from the verse, tone, and drift
of their ballads, that they are capable of the finest poetic
originality,2 but their poetry is in the hands of yeomen
and harpers. We perceive, by the precocity and energy
of their religious protests, that they are capable of the
most severe and impassioned creeds; but their faith
remains hidden in the shop-parlours of a few obscure
sectaries. Neither their faith nor their poetry has been

1 Commines, v. ch. 19 and 20 : "In my opinion, of all kingdoms
of the world of which I have any knowledge, where the public weal is
best observed, and least violence is exercised on the people, and where
no buildings are overthrown or demolished in war, England is the best ;
and the ruin and misfortune falls on them who wage the war. . . . The
kingdom of England has this advantage beyond other nations, that the
people and the country are not destroyed or burnt, nor the buildings
demolished ; and ill-fortune falls on men of war, and especially on the
nobles. "

* See the ballads of Chevy Chase, The Nut-Brovm Maid, eta
Many of them are admirable little dramas.

CHAP. ii. THE NORMANS. 169

able to attain its end or issue. The Eenaissance and
the Keformation, those two national outbreaks, are still
far off; and the literature of the period retains to the
end, like the highest ranks of English society, almost
the perfect stamp of its French origin and its foreign
models.

170 THE SOURCE. BOOK i.

CHAPTER III.

tongue.

I.

AMID so many barren endeavours, throughout the long
impotence of Norman literature, which was content to
copy, and of Saxon literature, which bore no fruit, a
definite language was nevertheless formed, and there
was room for a great writer. Geoffrey Chaucer appeared,
a man of mark, inventive though a disciple, original
though a translator, who by his genius, education, and
life, was enabled to know and to depict a whole world,
but above all to satisfy the chivalric world and the
splendid courts which shone upon the heights.1 He
belonged to it, though learned and versed in all branches
of scholastic knowledge ; and he took such a share in it,
that his life from beginning to end was that of a man
of the world, and a man of action. We find Mm by
turns in King Edward's army, in the king's train, hus-
band of a maid of honour to the queen, a pensioner, a
placeholder, a member of Parliament, a knight, founder
of a family which was hereafter to become allied to
royalty. Moreover, he was in the king's council, brother-
in-law of John of Gaunt, employed more than once in
open embassies or secret missions at Florence, Genoa,
Milan, Flanders, commissioner in France for the marriage

1 Born between 1328 and 1345, died in 1400.

CHAP. in. THE NEW TONGUE. 171

of the Prince of Wales, high up and low down on the
political ladder, disgraced, restored to place. This ex-
perience of business, travel, war, and the court, was not
like a book-education. He was at the court of Edward
III., the most splendid in Europe, amidst tourneys,
grand receptions, magnificent displays ; he took part in
the pomps of France and Milan ; conversed with
Petrarch, perhaps with Boccaccio and Froissart; was
actor in, and spectator of, the finest and most tragical of
dramas. In these few words, what ceremonies and
cavalcades are implied ! what processions in armour,
what caparisoned horses, bedizened ladies ! what display
of gallant and lordly manners ! what a varied and bril-
liant world, well suited to occupy the mind and eyes of
a poet ! Like Froissart, and better than he, Chaucer
could depict the castles of the nobles, their conversations,
their talk of love, and anything else that concerned
them, and please them by his portraiture.

II.

Two notions raised the middle age above the chaos of
barbarism : one religious, which had fashioned the
gigantic cathedrals, and swept the masses from their,
native soil to hurl them upon the Holy Land ; the other
secular, which had built feudal fortresses, and set the
man of courage erect and armed, within his own domain :
the one had produced the adventurous hero, the other
the mystical monk ; the one, to wit, the belief in God,
the other the belief in self. Both, running to excess,
had degenerated by the violence of their own strength :
the one had exalted independence into rebellion, the
other had turned piety into enthusiasm : the first made
man unfit for civil life, the second drew him back from

172 THE SOURCE. BOOK i

natural life : the one, sanctioning disorder, dissolved
society ; the other, enthroning infatuation, perverted
intelligence. Chivalry had need to be repressed because
it issued in brigandage ; devotion restrained because it
induced slavery. Turbulent feudalism grew feeble, like
oppressive theocracy ; and the two great master passions,
deprived of their sap and lopped of their stem, gave
place by their weakness to the monotony of habit and
the taste for worldliness, which shot forth in their stead
and flourished under their name.

Gradually, the serious element declined, in books as
in manners, in works of art as in books. Architecture,
instead of being the handmaid of faith, became the
slave of phantasy. It was exaggerated, became too
ornamental, sacrificing general effect to detail, shot up
its steeples to unreasonable heights, decorated its
churches with canopies, pinnacles, trefoiled gables, open-
work galleries. " Its whole aim was continually to
climb higher, to clothe the sacred edifice with a gaudy
bedizenment, as if it were a bride on her wedding morn-
ing." L Before this marvellous lacework, what emotion
could one feel but a pleased astonishment ? What
becomes of Christian sentiment before such scenic
ornamentations ? In like manner literature sets itself
to play. In the eighteenth century, the second age
of absolute monarchy, we saw on one side finials
and floriated cupolas, on the other pretty vers de soctiU,
courtly and sprightly tales, taking the place of severe
beauty-lines and noble writings. Even so in the four-
teenth century, the second age of feudalism, they had
on one side the stone fretwork and slender efflorescence
of aerial forms, and on the other finical verses and

1 Renan, De VArt au Moyen Age.

CHAP. in. THE NEW TONGUE. 173

diverting stories, taking the place of the old grand archi-
tecture and the old simple literature. It is no longer
the overflowing of a true sentiment which produces
them, but the craving for excitement. Consider Chau-
cer, his subjects, and how he selects them. He goes
far and wide to discover them, to Italy, France, to the
popular legends, the ancient classics. His readers need
diversity, and his business is to "provide fine tales:"
it was in those days the poet's business.1 The lords at
table have finished dinner, the minstrels come and sing,
the brightness of the torches falls on the velvet and
ermine, on the fantastic figures, the motley, the elab-
orate embroidery of their long garments ; then the poet
arrives, presents his manuscript, " richly illuminated,
bound in crimson violet, embellished with silver clasps
and bosses, roses of gold :" they ask him what his
subject is, and he answers " Love."

III.

In fact, it is the most agreeable subject, fittest to
make the evening hours pass sweetly, amid the goblets
filled with spiced wine and the burning perfumes.
Chaucer translated first that great storehouse of gallantry,
the Roman de la Eose. There is no pleasanter enter-
tainment. It is about a rose which the lover wished
to pluck : the pictures of the May months, the groves,
the flowery earth, the green hedgerows, abound and
display their bloom. Then come portraits of the
smiling ladies, Richesse, Fraunchise, Gaiety, and by
way of contrast, the sad characters, Daunger and

1 See Froissart, his life with the Count of Foix and with King
Richard II.

174: THE SOURCE. BOOK i.

Travail, all fully and minutely described, with detail of
features, clothing, attitude; they walk about, as on a
piece of tapestry, amid landscapes, dances, castles, among
allegorical groups, in lively sparkling colours, displayed,
contrasted, ever renewed and varied so as to entertain
the sight. For an evil has arisen, unknown to serious
ages — ennui : novelty and brilliancy followed by
novelty and brilliancy are necessary to withstand it;
and Chaucer, like Boccaccio and Froissart, enters into
the struggle with all his heart. He borrows from
Boccaccio his history of Palamon and Arcite, from
Lollius his history of Troilus and Cressida, and re-
arranges them. How the two young Theban knights,
Arcite and Palamon, both fall in love with the beautiful
Emily, and how Arcite, victorious in tourney, falls and
dies, bequeathing Emily to his rival; how the fine
Trojan knight Troilus wins the favour of Cressida,
and how Cressida abandons Mm for Diomedes — these
are still tales in verse, tales of love. A little tedious
they may be ; all the writings of this age ; French, or
imitated from French, are born of too prodigal minds ;
but how they glide along ! A winding stream, which
flows smoothly on level sand, and sparkles now and
again in the sun, is the only image we can compare it
to. The characters speak too much, but then they
speak so well ! Even when they dispute, we like to
listen, their anger and offences are so wholly based on
a happy overflow of unbroken converse. Remember
Froissart, how slaughters, assassinations, plagues, the
butcheries of the Jacquerie, the whole chaos of human
misery, disappears in his fine ceaseless humour, so that
the furious and grinning figures seem but ornaments
and choice embroideries to relieve the skein of shaded

CHAP. IIL THE NEW TONGUE. 175

and coloured silk which forms the groundwork of his
narrative ! but, in particular, a multitude of descriptions
spread their gilding over all. Chaucer leads you among
arms, palaces, temples, and halts before each beautiful
thing. Here :

" The statue of Venus glorious for to see
Was naked fleting in the large see,
And fro the navel doun all covered was
With wawes grene, and bright as any glas.
A citole in hire right hand hadde she,
And on hire hed, ful semely for to see,
A rose gerlond fressh, and wel smelling,
Above hire hed hire doves fleckering."1

Further on, the temple of Mars :

" First on the wall was peinted a forest,
In which ther wonneth neyther man ne best,
With knotty knarry barrein trees old
Of stubbes sharpe and hidous to behold ;
In which ther ran a romble and a swough,
As though a storme shuld bresten every bough :
And dounward from an -hill under a bent.
Ther stood the temple of Mars armipotent,
Wrought all of burned stele, of which th' entree
Was longe and streite, and gastly for to see.
And therout came a rage and swiche a vise,
That it made all the gates for to rise.
The northern light in at the dore shone,
For window on the wall ne was ther none,
Thurgh which men mighten any light discenie.
The dore was all of athamant eterne,
Yclenched overthwart and endeloiig
With yren tough, and for to make it strong,

1 Knight's Tale, ii. p. 59, I. 1957-1964.

176 THE SOURCE. BOOK L

Every piler the temple to sustene

Was tonne-gret, of yren bright and shene."1

Everywhere on the wall were representations of slaugh-
ter; and in the sanctuary

" The statue of Mars upon a carte stood
Armed, and loked grim as he were wood, . . .
A wolf ther stood beforne him at his fete
With eyen red, and of a man he ete."2

Are not these contrasts well designed to rouse the
imagination ? You will meet in Chaucer a succession
of similar pictures. Observe the train of combatants
who came to joust in the tilting field for Arcite and
Palamon :

" With him ther wenten knightes many on.
Som wol ben armed in an habergeon
And in a brestplate, and in a gipon ;
And som wol have a pair of plates large ;
And som wol have a Pruce sheld, or a targe,
Som wol ben armed on his legges wele,
And have an axe, and som a mace of stele. . . .
Ther maist thou se coming with Palamon
Licurge himself, the grete king of Trace :
Blake was his berd, and manly was his face.
The cercles of his eyen in his hed
They gloweden betwixen yelwe and red,
And like a griffon loked he about,
With kemped heres on his browes stout ;
His limmes gret, his braunes hard and stronge,
His shoiddres brode, his armes round and longe,
And as the guise was in his contree,
Ful highe upon a char of gold stood he,
With foure white holies in the trais.

J Knight's Tale, ii. p. 59, I. 1977-1996,
2 Ibid. D. 61, I. 2043-2050

CHAP. in. THE NEW TONGUE. 177

lustede of cote-armure on his harnais,
With nayles yelwe, and bright as any gold,
He hadde a beres skin, cole-blake for old.
His longe here was kempt behind his bak,
As any ravenes fether it shone for blake.
A wreth of gold arm-gret, of huge weight,
Upon his hed sate ful of stones bright,
Of fine rubins and of diamants.
About his char ther wenten white alauns,
Twenty and mo, as gret as any stere,
To hunten at the Icon or the dere,
And folwed him, with mosel fast ybound,
Colered with gold, and torettes filed round.
An hundred lordes had he in his route,
Armed ful wel, with hertes sterne and stoute.
With Arcita, in stories as men find,
The gret Emetrius the king of Inde,
Upon a stede bay, trapped in stele,
Covered with cloth of gold diapred wele,
Came riding like the god of armes Mars.
His cote-armure was of a cloth of Tars,
Couched with perles, white, and round and gret*
His sadel was of brent gold new ybete ;
A mantelet upon his shouldres hanging
Bret-ful of rubies red, as fire sparkling.
His crispe here like ringes was yronne,
And that was yelwe, and glitered as the sonne.
His nose was high, his eyen bright citrin,
His Hppes round, his colour was sanguiu . g ,
And as a leon he his lokiiig caste.
Of five and twenty yere his age I caste.
His berd was well begonnen for to spring ;
His vois was as a trompe thondering.
Upon his hed he wered of laurer grene
A gerlond fresshe and lusty for to sene.
VOL. I. N

178 THE SOURCE. BOOK L

Upon his bond he bare for his deduit
An egle tame, as any lily whit.
An hundred lordes had he with him there,
All armed save hir hedes in all hir gere,
Ful richely in alle man ere thinges . . .
About this king ther ran on every part
Ful many a tame leon and leopart." l

A herald would not describe them better nor more
fully. The lords and ladies of the time would recognise
here their tourneys and masquerades.

There is something more pleasant tlian a fine narra-
tive, and that is a collection of fine narratives, especially
when the narratives are all of different colourings.
Froissart gives us such under the name of Chronicles ;
Boccaccio still better ; after him the lords of the Cent
Nouvelles Nouvelles ; and, later still, Marguerite of
Navarre. What more natural among people who meet,
talk, and wish to amuse themselves. The manners of
the time suggest them; for the habits and tastes of
society had begun, and fiction thus conceived only
brings into books the conversations which are heard in
the hall and by the wayside. Chaucer describes a
troop of pilgrims, people of every rank, who are going
to Canterbury ; a knight, a sergeant of law, an Oxford
clerk, a doctor, a miller, a prioress, a monk, who agree
to tell a story all round :

" For trewely comfort ne mirthe is non,
To riden by the way domb as the ston."

They tell their stories accordingly; and on this slender
and flexible thread all the jewels of feudal imagination,
real or false, contribute one after another their motley
shapes to form a necklace ; side by side with noble

1 Knight's Tale, ii. p. 63, I. 2120-2188.

CHAP. in. THE NEW TONGUE. 179

and chivalrous stories : we have the miracle of an
infant whose throat was cut by Jews, the trials
of patient Griselda, Canace and marvellous fictions
of Oriental fancy, obscene stories of marriage and
monks, allegorical or moral tales, the fable of the
cock and hen, a list of great unfortunate persons :
Lucifer, Adam, Samson, Nebuchadnezzar, Zenobia,
Croesus, Ugolino, Peter of Spain. I leave out some,
for I must be brief. Chaucer is like a jeweller with
his hands full : pearls and glass beads, sparkling
diamonds and common agates, black jet and ruby roses,
all that history and imagination had been able to gather
and fashion during three centuries in the East, in
France, in Wales, in Provence, in Italy, all that had
rolled his way, clashed together, broken or polished by
the stream of centuries, and by the great jumble of
human memory, he holds in his hand, arranges it,
composes therefrom a long sparkling ornament, with
twenty pendants, a thousand facets, which by its splen-
dour, variety, contrasts, may attract and satisfy the eyes
of those most greedy for amusement and novelty.

He does more. The universal outburst of unchecked
curiosity demands a more refined enjoyment: reverie
and fantasy alone can satisfy it ; not profound and
thoughtful fantasy as we find it in Shakspeare, nor
impassioned and meditative reverie as we find it in
Dante, but the reverie and fantasy of the eyes, ears,
external senses, which in poetry as in architecture call
for singularity, wonders, accepted challenges, victories
gained over the rational and probable, and which are
satisfied only by what is crowded and dazzling. When
we look at a cathedral of that time, we feel a sort of
fear. Substance is wanting; the walls are hollowed

180 THE SOURCE. BOOK i,

out to make room for windows, the elaborate work of
the porches, the wonderful growth of the slender columns,
the thin curvature of arches — everything seems to
menace us ; support has been withdrawn to give way to
ornament. Without external prop or buttress, and
artificial aid of iron clamp-work, the building would
have crumbled to pieces on the first day ; as it is, it
undoes itself ; we have to maintain on the spot a colony
of masons continually to ward off the continual decay.
But our sight grows dim in following the wavings and
twistings of the endless fretwork; the dazzling rose-
window of the portal and the painted glass throw a
chequered light on the carved stalls of the choir, the
gold-work of the altar, the long array of damascened
and glittering copes, the crowd of statues, tier above
tier; and amid this violet light, this quivering purple,
amid these arrows of gold which pierce the gloom, the
entire building is like the tail of a mystical peacock.
So most of the poems of the time are barren of founda-
tion ; at most a trite morality serves them for mainstay :
in short, the poet thought of nothing else than dis-
playing before us a glow of colours and a jumble of
forms. They are dreams or visions ; there are five or
six in Chaucer, and you will meet more on your
advance to the Eenaissance. But the show is splendid.
Chaucer is transported in a dream to a temple of glass,1
on the walls of which are figured in gold all the legends
of Ovid and Virgil, an infinite train of characters and
dresses, like that which, on the painted glass in the
churches, occupied then the gaze of the faithful. Sud-
denly a golden eagle, which soars near the sun, and
glitters like a carbuncle descends with the swiftness of

1 The House of Fame.

CHAP. m. THE NEW TOJSGCJE. 181

lightning, and carries him off in his talons above the
stars, dropping him at last before the House of Fame,
splendidly built of beryl, with shining windows and
lofty turrets, and situated on a high rock of almost
inaccessible ice. All the southern side was graven
with the names of famous men, but the sun was con-
tinuously melting them. On the northern side, the
names, better protected, still remained. On the turrets
appeared the minstrels and "gestiours," with Orpheus,
Arion, and the great harpers, and behind them
myriads of musicians, with horns, flutes, bag-pipes, and
reeds, on which they played, and which filled the air;
then all the charmers, magicians, and prophets. He
enters, and in a high hall, plated with gold, embossed
with pearls, on a throne of carbuncle, he sees a woman
seated, a " noble quene," amidst an infinite number of
heralds, whose embroidered cloaks bore the arms of the
most famous knights in the world, and heard the sounds
of instruments, and the celestial melody of Calliope
and her sisters. From her throne to the gate was a
row of pillars, on which stood the great historians and
poets ; Josephus on a pillar of lead and iron ; Statius
on a pillar of iron stained with tiger's blood; Ovid,
"Venus' clerk," on a pillar of copper; then, on one
higher than the rest, Homer and Livy, Dares the Phry-
gian, Guido Colonna, Geoffrey of Monmoufch, and the
other historians of the war of Troy. Must I go on
copying this phantasmagoria, in which confused erudition
mars picturesque invention, and frequent banter shows
sign that the vision is only a planned amusement ?
The poet and his reader have imagined for half-an-hour
decorated halls and bustling crowds ; a slender thread
of common sense has ingeniously crept along the

182 THE SOURCE. BOOK L

transparent golden mist which they amuse themselves
with following. That suffices ; they are pleased with
their fleeting fancies, and ask no more.

Amid this exuberancy of mind, amid these refined
cravings, and this insatiate exaltation of imagination
and the senses, there was one passion, that of love, which,
combining all, was developed in excess, and displayed in
miniature the sickly charm, the fundamental and fatal
exaggeration, which are the characteristics of the age,
and which, later, the Spanish civilisation exhibits both
in its flower and its decay. Long ago, the courts of
love in Provence had . established the theory. " Each
one who loves," they said, "grows pale at the sight of
her whom he loves ; each action of the lover ends in
the thought of her whom he loves. Love can refuse
nothing to love." l This search after excessive sensation
had ended in the ecstasies and transports of Guido
Cavalcanti, and of Dante ; and in Languedoc a company
of enthusiasts had established themselves, love-penitents,
who, in order to prove the violence of their passion,
dressed in summer in furs and heavy garments, and in
winter in light gauze, and walked thus about the country,
so that several of them fell ill and died. Chaucer, in
their wake, explained in his verses the craft of love,2
the ten commandments, the twenty statutes of love ;
and praised his lady, his " daieseye," his " Margarite,"
his " vermeil rose ;" depicted love in ballads, visions,
allegories, didactic poems, in a hundred guises. This
ia chivalrous, lofty love, as it was conceived in the
middle age; above all, tender love. Troilus loves

1 Andre" le Chapelain, 1170.

9 Also the Court of Love, and perhaps The Assemble of Ladies and
La Belle Dame sans Merci.

CHAP. in. THE NEW TONGUE. 183

Cressida like a troubadour; without Pandarus, her
uncle, he would have languished, and ended by dying
in silence. He will not reveal the name of her he
loves. Pandarus has to tear it from him, perform all
the bold actions himself, plan every kind of stratagem.
Troilus, however brave and strong in battle, can but
weep before Cressida, ask her pardon, and faint.
Cressida, on her side, has every delicate feeling. When
Pandarus brings her Troilus' first letter, she begins by
refusing it, and is ashamed to open it : she opens it
only because she is told the poor knight is about to die.
At the first words "all rosy hewed tho woxe she;"
and though the letter is respectful, she will not answer
it. She yields at last to the importunities of her uncle,
and answers Troilus that she will feel for him the
affection of a sister. As to Troilus, he trembles all
over, grows pale when he sees the messenger return,
doubts his happiness, and will not believe the assurance
which is given him :

" But right so as these holtes and these hayis
That han in winter dead ben and dry,
Revesten hem in grene, whan that May is. ...
Right in that selfe wise, sooth for to sey,
Woxe suddainly his herte full of joy."1

Slowly, after many troubles, and thanks to the efforts
of Pandarus, he obtains her confession ; and in this
confession what a delightful charm !

" And as the newe abashed nightingale,
That stinteth first, whan she beginneth sing,
Whan that she heareth any heerdes tale,
Or in the hedges any wight stealing,
And after siker doeth her voice outring :
1 Troilus and Cressida, vol. v. bk. 3, p. 12-

184 THE SOURCE. BOOK L

Right so Creseide, whan that her drede stent,
Opened her herte and told him her entent." 1

He, as soon as he perceived a hope from afar,

" In chaunged voice, right for his very drede,
Which voice eke quoke, and thereto his manere,
Goodly abasht, and now his hewes rede,
Now pale, unto Cresseide his ladie dere,
With looke doun cast, and humble iyolden chere,
Lo, the alderfirst word that him astart
Was twice : * Mercy, mercy, 0 my sweet herte ! ' " 2

This ardent love breaks out in impassioned accents, in
bursts of happiness. Far from being regarded as a fault,
it is the source of all virtue. Troilus becomes braver,
more generous, more upright, through it ; his speech
runs now on love and virtue ; he scorns all villany ; he
honours those who possess merit, succours those who are
in distress ; and Cressida, delighted, repeats all day,
with exceeding liveliness, this song, which is like the
warbling of a nightingale :

" Whom should I thanken but you, god of love,
Of all this blisse, in which to bathe I ginne ?
And thanked be ye, lorde for that I love,
This is the right life that I am inne,
To flemen all maner vice and sinne :
This doeth me so to vertue for to entende
That daie by daie I in my will amende.
And who that saieth that for to love is vice, . . .
He either is envious, or right nice,
Or is unmightie for his shreudnesse
To loven. . . .

But I with all mine herte and all my might,
As I have saied, woll love unto my last,
1 Troilus and Oressida, vol. v. bk. 3, p. 40. 2 find. p. 4.

CHAP. in. THE NEW TONGUE. 185

My owne dere herte, and all mine owne knight,
In whiche mine herte growen is so fast,
And his in me, that it shall ever last." 1

But misfortune comes. Her father Calchas demands
her back, and the Trojans decide that they will give her
up in exchange for prisoners. At this news she swoons,
and Troilus is about to slay himself. Their love at this
time seems imperishable ; it sports with death, because
it constitutes the whole of life. Beyond that better
and delicious life which it created, it seems there can
be no other :

" But as God would, of swough she abraide,
And gan to sighe, and Troilus she cride,
And he answerde : * Lady mine, Creseide,
Live ye yet ? ' and let his swerde doun glide :

1 Ye herte mine, that thanked be Cupide, '
(Quod she), and therewithal she sore sight,
And he began to glade her as he might.

Took her in armes two and kist her oft,
And her to glad, he did al his entent,
For which her gost, that flikered aie a loft,
Into her wofull herte ayen it went :
But at the last, as that her eye glent
Aside, anon she gan his sworde aspie,
As it lay bare, and gan for feare crie.

And asked him why had he it out draw,

And Troilus anon the cause her told,

And how himself therwith he wold have slain.

For which Creseide upon him gan behold,

And gan him in her armes faste fold,

And said : ' 0 mercy God, lo which a dede !

Alas, how nigh we weren bothe dede ! ' " 2

1 Troilus and Cressida, vol. iv. bk. 2, p. 292.
' Ibid. vol. v. bk. 4, p. 97.

186 THE SOURCE. BOOK L

At last they are separated, with what vows and what
tears 1 and Troilus, alone in his chamber, murmurs :

" ' Where is mine owne lady lefe and dere 1
Where is her white brest, where is it, where 1
Where been her armes, and her eyen olere
That yesterday this time with me were ? ' . . .
Nor there nas houre in al the day or night,
Whan he was ther as no man might him here,
That he ne sayd : ' 0 lovesome lady bright,
How have ye faren sins that ye were there 1
Welcome y wis mine owne lady dere ! ' . .
Fro thence-forth he rideth up and doune,
And every thing came him to remembraunce,
As he rode forth by the places of the toune,
In which he whilom had all his pleasaunce :
' Lo, yonder saw I mine owne lady daunce,
And in that temple with her eien clere,
Me caught first my right lady dere.
And yonder have I herde full lustely
My dere herte laugh, and yonder play
Saw her ones eke ful blisfully,
And yonder ones to me gan she say,
-' Now, good sweete, love me well I pray.
And yonde so goodly gan she me behold,
That to the death mine herte is to her hold.
And at the corner in the yonder house
Herde I mine alderlevest lady dere,
So womanly, with voice melodiouse,
Singen so wel, so goodly, and so clere,
That in my soule yet me thinketh I here
The blissful sowne, and in that yonder place,
My lady first me toke unto her grace.' "l

None has since found more true and tender words

1 Troilus and Oressida, vol. v. bk. 5, p. 119 et pastim.

CHAP. in. THE NEW TONGUE. 187

These are the charming " poetic branches " which
flourished amid gross ignorance and pompous parades.
Human intelligence in the middle age had blossomed on
that side where it perceived the light.

But mere narrative does not suffice to express his
felicity and fancy ; the poet must go where " shoures
sweet of rain descended soft."

" And every plaine was clothed faire
With new greene, and maketh small floures
To springen here and there in field and in mede,
So very good and wholsorue be the shoures,
That it renueth that was old and dede,
In winter time ; and out of every sede
Springeth the hearbe, so that every wight
Of this season wexeth glad and light. . . .
In which (grove) were okes great, streight as a line,
Under the which the grasse so fresh of hew
Was newly sprong, and an eight foot or nine
Every tree well fro his fellow grew."

He must forget himself in the vague felicity of the
country, and, like Dante, lose himself in ideal light and
allegory. The dreams of love, to continue true, must
not take too visible a form, nor enter into a too conse-
cutive history ; they must float in a misty distance
the soul in which they hover can no longer think of the
laws of existence ; it inhabits another world ; it forgets
itself in the ravishing emotion which troubles it, and
sees its well-loved visions rise, mingle, come and go, as
in summer we see the bees on a hill-slope flutter in a
haze of light, and circle round and round the flowers.

One morning,1 a lady sings, at the dawn of day, I
entered an oak-grove

1 The Flower and the Leaf, vi. p. 244, I. 6-32.

188 THE SOURCE. BOOK i.

" With branches brode, laden with leves new,
That sprongen out ayen the sunne-shene,
Some very red, and some a glad light grene. . . . *

And I, that all this pleasaunt sight sie,
Thought sodainly I felt so sweet an aire
Of the eglentere, that certainely
There is no hert, I deme, in such dispaire,
Ne with thoughts froward and contraire,
So overlaid, but it should soone have bote,
If it had ones felt this savour sote.

And as I stood, and cast aside mine eie,

I was ware of the fairest medler tree

That ever yet in all my life I sie,

As full of blossomes as it might be ;

Therein a goldfinch leaping pretile

Fro bough to bough ; and, as him list, he eet

Here and there of buds and floures sweet. . . .

And as I sat, the birds barkening thus,
Methought that I heard voices sodainly,
The most sweetest and most delicious
That ever any wight, I trow truly,
Heard in their life, for the armony
And sweet accord was in so good musike,
That the voice to angels most was like." 2

Then she sees arrive " a world of ladies ... in surcotes
white of velvet ... set with emerauds ... as of
great pearles round and orient, and diamonds fine and
rubies red." And all had on their head " a rich fret of
gold . . . full of stately riche stones set," with " a
chapelet of branches fresh and grene . . . some of

1 The Flower and the Leaf, p. 245, I. 33.
2 Ibid. vi. p. 246, I. 78-133.

CHAP. in. THE NEW TONGUE. 189

laurer, some of woodbind, some of agnus castus ; " and
at the same time came a train of valiant knights in
splendid array, with " harneis " of red gold, shining in
the sun, and noble steeds, with trappings " of cloth of
gold, and furred with ermine." These knights and
ladies were the servants of the Leaf, and they sate under
a great oak, at the feet of their queen.

From the other side came a bevy of ladies as resplen-
dent as the first, but crowned with fresh flowers. These
were the servants of the Flower. They alighted, and
began to dance in the meadow. But heavy clouds
appeared in the sky, and a storm broke out. They
wished to shelter themselves under the oak, but there
was no more room ; they ensconced themselves as they
could in the hedges and among the brushwood ; the rain
came down and spoiled their garlands, stained their
robes, and washed away their ornaments ; when the
sun returned, they went to ask succour from the queen
of the Leaf ; she, being merciful, consoled them, repaired
the injury of the rain, and restored their original beauty.
Then all disappears as in a dream.

The lady was astonished, when suddenly a fair dame
appeared and instructed her. She learned that the
servants of the Leaf had lived like brave knights, and
those of the Flower had loved idleness and pleasure.
She promises to serve the Leaf, and came away.

Is this an allegory ? There is at least a lack of wit.
There is no ingenious enigma ; it is dominated by fancy,
and the poet thinks only of displaying in quiet verse
the fleeting and brilliant train which had amused his
mind, and charmed his eyes.

Chaucer himself, on the first of May, rises and goes
out into the meadows. Love enters his heart with the

190 THE SOURCE. BOOK L

balmy air ; the landscape is transfigured, and the birds
begin to speak :

There sate I downe among the faire flours,
And saw the birds trip out of hir bours,
There as they rested hem all the night,
They were so joyfull of the dayes light,
They began of May for to done honours.

They coud that service all by rote,
There was many a lovely note,
Some song loud as they had plained,
And some in other manner voice yfained
And some all out with the ful throte.

The proyned hem and made hem right gay,
And daunceden, and lepten on the spray,
And evermore two and two in fere,
Right so as they had chosen hem to yere,
In Feverere upon saint Valentines day.

And the- river that I sate upon,
It made such a noise as it ron,
Accordaunt with the birdes armony,
Methought it was the best melody
That might ben yheard of any mon." l

This confused harmony of vague noises troubles the
sense ; a secret languor enters the soul. The cuckoo
throws his monotonous voice like a mournful and tender
sigh between the white ash-tree boles ; the nightingale
makes his triumphant notes roll and ring above the
leafy canopy ; fancy breaks in unsought, and Chaucer
hears them dispute of Love. They sing alternately an
antistrophic song, and the nightingale weeps for vexation
to hear the cuckoo speak in depreciation of Love. He

1 The Cuckow and Nightingale, vi. p. 121, 1. 67-85.

CHAP. in. TH.& JNEvV TONGUE. 191

is consoled, however, by the poet's voice, seeing that he
also suffers with him :

" ' For love and it hath doe me much wo.'
' Ye use ' (quod she) ' this medicine
Every day this May or thou dine
Go looke upon the fresh daisie,
And though thou be for wo in point to die,
That shall full greatly lessen thee of thy pine.

' And looke alway that thou be good and trew,
And I wol sing one of the songes new,
For love of thee, as loud as I may crie : '
And than she began this song full hie,

' I shrewe all hem that been of love untrue.' "l

To such exquisite delicacies love, as with Petrarch,
had carried poetry ; by refinement even, as with Pe-
trarch, it is lost now and then in its wit, conceits,
clinches. But a marked characteristic at once separates
it from Petrarch. If over-excited, it is also grace-
ful, polished, full of archness, banter, fine sensual
gaiety, somewhat gossipy, as the French always paint
love. Chaucer follows his true masters, and is himself
an elegant speaker, facile, ever ready to smile, loving
choice pleasures, a disciple of the Roman de la Rose, and
much less Italian than French.2 The bent of French
character makes of love not a passion, but a gay banquet,
tastefully arranged, in which the service is elegant, the
food exquisite, the silver brilliant, the two guests in full
dress, in good humour, quick to anticipate and please
each other, knowing how to keep up the gaiety, and
when to part. In Chaucer, without doubt, this other

1 The Cuckow and Nightingale, vi. p. 126, 1. 230-241.
* Stendhal, On Love : the difference of Love-taste and Love-passion.

192 THE SOURCE. BOOK i.

altogether worldly vein runs side by side with the
sentimental element. If Troilus is a weeping lover,
Pandaras is a lively rascal, who volunteers for a singu-
lar service with amusing urgency, frank immorality,
and carries it out carefully, gratuitously, thoroughly.
In these pretty attempts Chaucer accompanies him as
far as possible, and is not shocked. On the contrary,
he makes fun out of it. At the critical moment, with
transparent hypocrisy, he shelters himself behind his
" author." If you find the particulars free, he says, it is
not my fault ; " so writen clerks in hir bokes old," and
" I mote, aftir min auctour, telle . . ." Not only is
he gay, but he jests throughout the whole tale. He
sees clearly through the tricks of feminine modesty ; he
laughs at it archly, knowing full well what is behind ;
he seems to be saying, finger on lip : " Hush ! let the
grand words roll on, you will be edified presently."
We are, in fact, edified ; so is he, and in the nick of
time he goes away, carrying the light : " For ought I
can aspies, this light nor I ne serven here of nought."
" Troilus," says uncle Pandarus, " if ye be wise, sweven-
eth not now, lest more folke arise." Troilus takes care
not to swoon ; and Cressida at last, being alone with
him, speaks wittily and with prudent delicacy ; there
is here an exceeding charm, no coarseness. Their
happiness covers all, even voluptuousness, with a pro-
fusion and perfume of its heavenly roses. At most a
slight spice of archness flavours it : " and gode thrift he
had full oft." Troilus holds his mistress in his arms :
" with worse hap God let us never mete." The poet is
almost as well pleased as they : for him, as for the men
of his time, the sovereign good is love, not damped, but
satisfied ; they ended even by thinking such love a

CHAP. in. THE NEW TONGUE. 193

merit. The ladies declared in their judgments, that
when .people love, they can refuse nothing to the
beloved. Love has become law ; it is inscribed in a
code ; they combine it with religion ; and there is a
sacrament of love, in which the birds in their anthems
sing matins.1 Chaucer curses with all his heart the
covetous wretches, the business men, who treat it as a
madness :

" As would God, tho wretches that despise
Service of love had eares al so long
As had Mida, fill of covetise, . . .
To teachen hem, that they been in the vice
And lovers not, although they hold hem nice,
. . . God yeve hem mischaunce,
And every lover in his trouth avaunce."2

He clearly lacks severity, so rare in southern literature.
The Italians in the middle age made a virtue of joy ; and
you perceive that the world of chivalry, as conceived by
the French, expanded morality so as to confound it
with pleasure.

IV.

There are other characteristics still more gay. The
true Gallic literature crops up ; obscene tales, practical
jokes on one's neighbour, not shrouded in the Ciceronian
style of Boccaccio, but related lightly by a man in good
humour ;3 above all, active ro^nery, the trick of laughing
at your neighbour's expense. Chaucer displays it better
than Rutebeuf, and sometimes better than La Fontaine.
He does not knock his men down ; he pricks them as

1 The Court of Love, about 1353, et seq. See also the Testament of
Love.

2 Troilits and Cressida, vol. v. iii. pp. 44, 46.

8 The story of the pecir-tree (Merchant's Tale), and of the cradle
(Reeve's Tale), for instance, in the Canterbury Tales.

VOL. I. O

194 THE SOURCE. BOOK i.

he passes, not from deep hatred or indignation, but
through sheer nimbleness of disposition, and quick sense
of the ridiculous; he throws his gibes at them by
handfuls. His man of law is more a man of business
than of the world :

" No wher so besy a rnaii as he ther n'as,
And yet he semed besier than he was."1

His three burgesses :

" Everich, for the wisdom that he can
Was shapelich for to ben an alderman.
For catel hadden they ynough and rent,
And eke hir wives wolde it wel assent."2

Of the mendicant Friar he says :

" His wallet lay beforne him in his lappe,
Bret-ful of pardon come from Rome al note."3

The mockery here comes from the heart, in the French
manner, without effort, calculation, or vehemence. It
is so pleasant and so natural to banter one's neighbour !
Sometimes the lively vein becomes so copious, that it
furnishes an entire comedy, indelicate certainly, but so
free and life-like ! Here is ,the portrait of the Wife of
Bath, who has buried five husbands ;

" Bold was hire face, and fayre and rede of hew,
She was a worthy woman all hire live ;
Housboudes at the chirche dore had she had five,
Withouten other compagnie in youthe. . . .
In all the parish wif ne was ther non,
That to the offring before hire shulde gon,
And if ther did, certain so wroth was she,
That she was out of alle charitee."4

» Canterbury Tales, prologue, p. 10, I 323. 2 Ibid. p. 12, I. 378.
» find. p. 21, I. 688. * Ibid. ii. prologue, p. 14, I 460.

CHAP. in. THE NEW TONGUE. 195

What a tongue she has ! Impertinent, full of vanity,
bold, chattering, unbridled, she silences everybody, and
holds forth for an hour before coming to her tale.
We hear her grating, high-pitched, loud, clear voice,
wherewith she deafened her husbands. She continually
harps upon the same ideas, repeats her reasons, piles
them up and confounds them, like a stubborn mule who
runs along shaking and ringing his bells, so that the
stunned listeners remain open-mouthed, wondering that
a single tongue can spin out so many words. The
subject was worth the trouble. She proves that she
did well to marry five husbands, and she proves it
clearly, like a woman who knew it, because she had
tried it :

" God bad us for to wex and multiplie ;
That gentil text can I wel understond ;
Eke wel I wot, he sayd, that min husbond
Shuld leve fader and moder, and take to me ;
But of no nbumbre mention made he,
Of bigamie or of octogamie ;
Why shuld men than speke of it vilanie ?
Lo here the wise king dan Solomon,
I trow he hadde wives mo than on,
(As wolde God it leful were to me
To be refreshed half so oft as he,)
Which a gift of God had he for alle his wives ? . . ,
Blessed be God that I have wedded five.
Welcome the sixthe whan that ever he shall. . . .
He (Christ) spake to hem that wold live parfitly,
And lordings (by your leve), that am nat I ;
I wol bestow the flour of all myn age
In th' actes and the fruit of manage. . . .
An husbond wol I have, I wol not lette,
Which shal be both my dettour and my thrall

196 THE SOURCE. BOOK i

And have his tribulation withall

Upon his flesh, while that I am his wif."1

Here Chaucer has the freedom of Moliere, and we possess
it no longer. His good wife justifies marriage in terms
just as technical as Sganarelle. It behoves us to turn
the pages quickly, and follow in the lump only this
Odyssey of marriages. The experienced wife, who has
journeyed through life with five husbands, knows the
art of taming them, and relates how she persecuted them
with jealousy, suspicion, grumbling, quarrels, blows given
and received; how the husband, checkmated by the
continuity of the tempest, stooped at last, accepted the
halter, and turned the domestic mill like a conjugal and
resigned ass :

" For as an hors, I coude bite and whine ;
I coude plain, and I was in the gilt. . . .
I plained first, so was our werre ystint.
They were ful glad to excusen hem ful blivc
Of thing, the which they never agilt hir live. . . .
I swore that all my walking out by night
Was for to espien wenches that he dight. . . .
For though the pope had sitten hem beside,
I wold not spare hem at hir owen bord. . . .
But certainly I made folk swiche chere,
That in his owen grese I made him frie
For anger, and for veray jalousie.
By God, in erth I was his purgatorie,
For which I hope his soule be in glorie."2

She saw the fifth first at the burial of the fourth :

" And Jankin oure clerk was on of tho :
As helpe me God, whan that I saw him go

1 Canterbury Tales, ii. Wife of Bath's Prologue, p. 168, L 5610-5780
3 nrid. ii. p. 179, I. 5968-6072.

CHAP. in. THE NEW TONGUE. 197

Aftir the here, me thought he had a paire

Of legges and of feet, so clene and faire,

That all nay herte I yave unto his hold.

He was, I trow, a twenty winter old,

And I was fourty, if I shal say soth. . . .

As helpe me God, I was a lusty on,

And faire, and riche, and yonge, and well begon."1

rt Yonge," what a word ! Was human delusion ever more
happily painted? How life-like is all, and how easy
the tone. It is the satire of marriage. You will find
it twenty times in Chaucer. Nothing more is wanted
to exhaust the two subjects of French mockery, than to
unite with the satire of marriage the satire of religion.
We find it here; and Rabelais is not more bitter.
The monk whom Chaucer paints is a hypocrite, a jolly
fellow, who knows good inns and jovial hosts better than
the poor and the hospitals :

" A Frere there was, a wanton and a mery . . .
Ful wel beloved, and familier was he
With frankeleins over all in his contree,
And eke with worthy wimmen of the toun. .
Full swetely herde he confession,
And pleasant was his absolution.
He was an esy man to give penance,
Ther as he wiste to han a good pitance :
For unto a poure ordre for to give
Is signe that a man is wel yshrive. . . .
And knew wel the tavernes in every toun,
And every hosteler and gay tapstere,
Better than a lazar and a beggere. . . .
It is not honest, it may not avance,
As for to delen with no swich pouraille,
But all with riche and sellers of vitaille. . . .
i Canterbury Tales, Wift of Bath's Prologue, p. 185, I. 6177-6188-

198 THE SOURCE. BOOK i.

For many a man so hard is of his herte,
He may not wepe, although him sore snierte.
Therfore in stede of weping and praieres,
Men mote give silver to the poure freres."1
This lively irony had an exponent before in Jean de
Meung. But Chaucer pushes it further, and gives it life
and motion. His monk begs from house to house, hold-
ing out his wallet :

" In every hous he gan to pore and prie,
And begged mele and chese, or elles corn. . .

' Yeve us a bushel whete, or malt, or reye,
A Goddes kichel, or a trippe of chese,
Or elles what you list, we may not chese ;
A Goddes halfpeny, or a masse peny ;
Or yeve us of your braun, if ye have any,
A dagon of your blanket, leve dame,
Our suster dere (lo here I write your name).' . -. .
And whan that he was out at dore, anon,
He planed away the names everich on."2

He has kept for the end of his circuit, Thomas, one of
his most liberal clients. He finds him in bed, and ill ;
here is excellent fruit to suck and squeeze :

" ' God wot/ quod he, ' laboured have I ful sore,
And specially for thy salvation,
Have I sayd many a precious orison. . . .
I have this day ben at your chirche at messe . .
And ther I saw our dame, a, wher is she V "

The dame enters :

" This frere ariseth up ful curtisly,
And hire embraceth in his armes narwe,
And kisseth hire swete and chirketh as a spar we."* . . .

1 Canterbury Tales, prologue, ii. p. 7, I. 208 et passim.
3 Ibid. The Sompnoures Tale, ii. p. 220, I. 7319-7340.
8 Ibid. p. 221, I. 7366. 4 jfoa. p. 221, I. 7384.

CHAP. in. THE NEW TONGUE. 199

Then, in his sweetest and most caressing voice, he com-
pliments her, and says :

" * Thanked be God that you yaf soule and lif,
Yet saw I not this day so faire a wif
In all the chirche, God so save me.'"1

Have we not here already Tartuffe and Elmire ? But
the monk is with a farmer, and can go to work more
quickly and directly. When the compliments ended,
he thinks of the substance and asks the lady to let
him talk alone with Thomas. He must inquire after
the state of his soul :

" ( I wol with Thomas speke a litel throw :
Thise curates ben so negligent and slow
To gropen tendrely a conscience. . . .
Now, dame,' quod he, (jeo vous die sanz doute,
Have I nat of a capon but the liver,
And of your white bred nat but a shiver,
And after that a rested pigges hed
(But I ne wolde for me no beest were ded),
Than had I with you homly suffisance.
I am a man of litel sustenance,
My spirit hath his fostring in the Bible.
My body is ay so redy and penible
To waken, that my stomak is destroied.' " 2

Poor man, he raises his hands to heaven, and ends with
a sigh.

The wife tells him her child died a fortnight before.
Straightway he manufactures a miracle ; could he earn
his money in any better way ? He had a revelation of
this death in the " dortour " of the convent ; he saw the

1 Canterbury Tales, ii. The Sompnoures Tale, p. 222, /. 7389.
2 Ibid. p. 222, I. 7397-7429.

200 THE SOURCE. BOOK i.

child earned to paradise; he rose with his brothers,
" with many a tere trilling on our cheke," and they sang
a Te Deum :

" ' For, sire and dame, trusteth me right wel,
Our orisons ben more effectuel,
And more we seen of Cristes secree thinges
Than borel folk, although that they be kinges.
We live in poverte, and in abstinence,
And borel folk in richesse and dispence. . .
Lazer and Dives liveden diversely,
And divers guerdon hadden they therby.' " ]

Presently he spurts out a whole sermon, in a loathsome
style, and with an interest which is plain enough. The
sick man, wearied, replies that he has already given half
his fortune to all kinds of monks, and yet he continually
suffers. Listen to the grieved exclamation, the true
indignation of the mendicant monk, who sees himself
threatened by the competition of a brother of the cloth
to share his client, his revenue, his booty, his food-
supplies :

" The frere answered : ' 0 Thomas, dost thou so ?
What nedeth you diverse freres to seche 1
What nedeth him that hath a parfit leche.
To sechen other leches in the toun ?
Your inconstance is your confusion.
Hold ye than me, or elles our covent,
To pray for you ben insufficient 1
Thomas, that jape n' is not worth a mite,
Your maladie is for we han to lite.' "2

.Recognise the great orator; he employs even the grand
style to keep the supplies from being cut off:

1 Canterbury Tales, ii. The Sompnoures Tale, p. 223, I 7450-7460.
2 Ibid. p. 226, I. 7536-7544.

CHAF. in. THE NEW TONGUE. 201

" * A, yeve that oovent half a quarter otes ;
Aud yeve that covent four and twenty grotes j
And yeve that frere a peuy, and let him go :
Nay, nay, Thomas, it may no thing be so.
What is a ferthing worth parted on twelve
Lo, eche thing that is oned in himself
Is more strong, than whan it is yscatered . . .
Thou woldest han our labour al for nought.' " l

Then he begins again his sermon in a louder tone,
shouting at each word, quoting examples from Seneca
and the classics, a terrible fluency, a trick of his trade,
which, diligently applied, must draw money from the
patient. He asks for gold, " to make our cloistre,"

" . . . * And yet, God wot, uneth the fundament
Parfourmed is, ne of our pavement
N' is not a tile yet within our wones ;
By God, we owen fourty pound for stones.
Now help Thomas, for him that harwed helle,
For elles mote we oure bokes selle,
And if ye lacke oure predication,
Than goth this world all to destruction.
For who so fro this world wold us bereve.
So God me save, Thomas, by your leve,
He wold bereve out of this world the sonne.' " 2

In the end, Thomas in a rage promises him a gift, tells
him to put his hand in the bed and take it, and sends
him away duped, mocked, and covered with filth.

We have descended now to popular farce : when
amusement must be had at any price, it is sought, as
here, in broad jokes, even in filthiness. We can see how
these two coarse and vigorous plants have blossomed in

1 Oanterbury Tales, ii. Tim. Sompnvwrcs Tale, p. 226, 1. 7545-7568.
2 Ibid. p. 230, 1 7685-7695.

202 THE SOOEOE. BOOK L

the dung of the middle age. Planted by the sly fellows
of Champagne and Ile-de-France, watered by the trou-
vtres, they were destined fully to expand, speckled and
ruddy, in the large hands of Eabelais. Meanwhile
Chaucer plucks his nosegay from it. Deceived husbands,
mishaps in inns, accidents in bed, cuffs, kicks, and rob-
beries, these suffice to raise a loud laugh. Side by side
with noble pictures of chivalry, he gives us a train of
Flemish grotesque figures, carpenters, joiners, friars,
summ oners; blows abound, fists descend on fleshy backs;
many nudities are shown ; they swindle one another out
of their corn, their wives ; they pitch one another out
of a window ; they brawl and quarrel. A bruise, a piece
of open filthiness, passes in such society for a sign of
wit. The summoner, being rallied by the friar, gives
him tit for tat :

" ' This Frere bosteth that he knoweth helle,
And, God it wot, that is but litel wonder,
Freres and fendes ben but litel asonder.
For parde, ye ban often time herd telle
How that a Frere ravished was to helle
In spirit ones by a visioun,
And as an angel lad him up and doun,
To shewen him the peines that ther were, . . .
And unto Sathanas he lad him doun.
(And now hath Sathanas/ saith he. ' a tayl
Broder than of a Carrike is the sayl.)
Hold up thy tayl, thou Sathanas, quod he,

and let the Frere see

Wher is the nest of Freres in this place.
And er than half a furlong way of space,
.Right so as bees out swannen of an hive,
Out of the devils . . . ther gonnen to drive.
A twenty thousand Freres on a route,

CHAP. in. THE NEW TONGUE. 203

And thurghout hell they swarmed al aboute,
And com agen, as fast as they may gon.' " l

Such were the coarse buffooneries of the popular im-
agination.

V.

It is high time to return to Chaucer himself. Beyond
the two notable characteristics which settle his place in
his age and school of poetry, there are others which take
him out of his age and school. If he was romantic and
gay like the rest, it was after a fashion of his own. He
observes characters, notes their differences, studies the
coherence of their parts, endeavours to describe living
individualities, — a thing unheard of in his time, but
which the renovators in the sixteenth century, and
first among them Shakspeare, will do afterwards. Is it
already the English positive common sense and aptitude
for seeing the inside of things which begins to appear ?
A new spirit, almost manly, pierces through, in Litera-
ture as in painting, with Chaucer as with Van Eyck,
with both at the same time ; no longer the childish
imitation of chivalrous life 2 or monastic devotion, but
the grave spirit of inquiry and craving for deep truths,
whereby art becomes complete. For the first time, in
Chaucer as in Van Eyck, the character described stands
out in relief ; its parts are connected ; it is no longer an
unsubstantial phantom. You may guess its past and fore-
tell its future action. Its externals manifest the personal
and incommunicable details of its inner nature, and the

1 Canterbury Tales, ii. The Sompnoures Prologue, p. 217, 1. 7254-
7279.

2 See in The Canterbury Tales the Rhyme of Sir Topas, a parody on
the chivalric histories. Each character there seems a precursor of
Cervantes.

204 THE SOURCE. BOOK i.

infinite complexity of its economy and motion. To
this day, after four centuries, that character is individu-
alised, and typical ; it remains distinct in our memory,
like the creations of Shakspeare and Rubens. We
observe this growth in the very act. Not only does
Chaucer, like Boccaccio, bind his tales into a single
history; but in addition — and this is wanting in Boc-
caccio— he begins with the portrait of all his narrators,
knight, summoner, man of law, monk, bailiff or reeve,
host, about thirty distinct figures, of every sex, condition,
age, each painted with his disposition, face, costume,
turns of speech, little significant actions, habits, ante-
cedents, each maintained in his character by his talk and
subsequent actions, so that we can discern here, sooner
than in any other nation, the germ of the domestic novel
as we write it to-day. Think of the portraits of the
franklin, the miller, the mendicant friar, and wife of
Bath. There are plenty of others which show the broad
brutalities, the coarse tricks, and the pleasantries of
vulgar life, as well as the gross and plentiful feas tings of
sensual life. Here and there honest old swashbucklers,
who double their fists, and tuck up their sleeves : or con-
tented beadles, who, when they have drunk, will speak
nothing but Latin. But by the side of these there are
some choice characters ; the knight, who went on a
crusade to Granada and Prussia, brave and courteous :

" And though that he was worthy he was wise,
And of his port as meke as is a mayde.
He never yet no vilanie ne sayde
In alle his lif, unto no manere wight,
He was a veray parfit gen til knight."1

1 Prologue to Canterbury Tales, il p. 3, Z. 68-72,

. m. THE NEW TONGUE. 205

" With him, ther was his sone, a yonge Squier.
A lover, and a lusty bacheler,
With lockes crull as they were laide in presse
Of twenty yere of age he was I gesse.
Of his stature he was of even lengthe,
And wonderly deliver, and grete of strengthe.
And he hadde be somtime in chevachie,
In Flaimdres, in Artois, and in Picardie,
And borne him wel, as of so litel space,
In hope to stonden in his ladies grace.

Embrouded was he, as it were a mede
Alle ful of fresshe floures, white and rede.
Singing he was, or floyting alle the day,
He was as fresshe, as is the moneth of May.
Short was his goune, with sieves long and wide.
Wei coude he sitte on hors, and fayre ride.
He coude songes make, and wel endite,
Juste and eke dance, and wel pourtraie and write.
So hote he loved, that by nightertale
He slep no more than doth the nightingale.
Curteis he was, lowly and servisable,
And carf befor his fader at the table." l

There is also a poor and learned clerk of Oxford ; and
finer still, and more worthy of a modern hand, the
Prioress, " Madame Eglantine," who as a nun, a maiden,
a great lady, is ceremonious, and shows signs of exquisite
taste. Would a better be found now-a-days in a Ger-
man chapter, amid the most modest and lively bevy oi
sentimental and literary canonesses ?

" Ther was also a Nonne, a Prioresse,
That of hire smiling was ful simple and coy
Hire gretest othe n'as but by Seint Eloy ;
And she was cleped Madame Eglentine.

1 Prologue to Canterbury Tales, ii. p. 3, 1. 79-100.

206 THE SOURCE. BOOK i

Ful wel she sange the service devine,

Entuned in hire nose ful swetely ;

And Frenche she spake ful fayre and fetisly

After the scole of Stratford-atte-bowe,

For Frenche of Paris, was to hire unknowe.

At mete was she wel ytaughte withalle ;

She lette no morsel from hire lippes falle,

Ne wette hire fingres in hire sauce depe.

Wel coude she carie a morsel, and wel kepe,

Thatte no drope ne fell upon hire brest.

In curtesie was sette ful moche hire lest.

Hire over lippe wiped she so clene,

That in hire cuppe was no ferthing sene

Of grese, whan she dronken hadde hire draught,

Ful semely after hire mete she raught.

And sikerly she was of grete disport

And ful plesant, and amiable of port,

And peined hire to contrefeten chere

Of court, and ben estatelich of manere,

And to ben holden digne of reverence." l

Are you offended by these provincial affectations ?
Not at all; it is delightful to behold these nice and
pretty ways, these little affectations, the waggery and
prudery, the half-worldly, half-monastic smile. We
inhale a delicate feminine perfume, preserved and grown
old under the stomacher :

" But for to speken of hire conscience,
She was so charitable and so pitous.
She wolde wepe if that she saw a mous
Oaughte in a trappe, if it were ded or bledde.
Of smale houndes hadde she, that she fedde
With rested flesh, and milk, and wastel brede.
But sore wept she if on of hem were dede,

* Prologue to Canterbury Tales, ii p. 4, 1. 118-141.

CHAP. in. THE NEW TONGUE. 207

Or if men smote it with a yerde smert :
And all was conscience and tendre herte." l

Many elderly ladies throw themselves into such affec-
tions as these, for lack of others. Elderly ! what an
objectionable word have I employed ! She was not
elderly :

" Fill semely hire wimple ypinched was,

Hire nose tretis ; hire eyen grey as glas ;

Hire mouth ful smale, and therto soft and red j

But sikerly she hadde a fayre forehed.

It was almost a spanne brode I trowe ;

For hardily she was not undergrowe.
Ful fetise was hire cloke, as I was ware.

Of small corall aboute hire arm she bare

A pair of bedes, gauded al with grene ;

And thereon heng a broche of gold ful shene,

On whiche was first ywritten a crouned A,

And after, Amor vincit omnia" 2

A pretty ambiguous device, suitable either for gallantry
or devotion; the lady was both of the world and the
cloister : of the world, you may see it in her dress ; of
the cloister, you gather it from " another Nonne also
with hire hadde she, that was hire chapelleine, and
Preestes thre;" from the Ave Maria which she sings,
the long edifying stories which she relates. She is like
a fresh, sweet, and ruddy cherry, made to ripen in the
sun, but which, preserved in an ecclesiastical jar, has
become candied and insipid in the syrup.

Such is the power of reflection which begins to dawn,
such the high art. Chaucer studies here, rather than aims
at amusement ; he ceases to gossip, and thinks ; instead

1 Prologue to Canterbury Tales, ii. p. 5, 1. 142-150.
8 Ibid. 1. 151-162.

208 THE SOURCE, BOOK i.

of surrendering himself to the facility of flowing im-
provisation, he plans. Each tale is suited to the teller :
the young squire relates a fantastic and Oriental history ;
the tipsy miller a loose and comical story ; the honest
clerk the touching legend of Griselda. All these tales
are bound together, and that much better than by Boc-
caccio, by little veritable incidents, which spring from
the characters of the personages, and such as we light
upon in our travels. The horsemen ride on in good
humour in the sunshine, in the open country ; they con-
verse. The miller has drunk too much ale, and will
speak, "and for no man forbere." The cook goes to
sleep on his beast, and they play practical jokes on him.
The monk and the su mm oner get up a dispute about
their respective lines of business. The host restores
peace, makes them speak or be silent, like a man who
has long presided in the inn parlour, and who has often
had to check brawlers. They pass judgment on the
stories they listen to : declaring that there are few
Griseldas in the world ; laughing at the misadventures
of the tricked carpenter ; drawing a lesson from the
moral tale. The poem is no longer, as in the contempo-
rary literature, a mere procession, but a painting in
which the contrasts are arranged, the attitudes chosen,
the general effect calculated, so that it becomes life and
motion ; we forget ourselves at the sight, as in the case
of every life-like work; and we long to get on horse-
back on a fine sunny morning, and canter along green
meadows with the pilgrims to the shrine of the good
saint of Canterbury.

Weigh the value of the words "general effect."
According as we plan it or not, we enter on our
maturity or infancy ? The whole future lies in these

CHAP. m. THE NEW TONGUE. 209

two words. Savages or half savages, warriors of the
Heptarchy or knights of the middle-age; up to this
period, no one had reached to this point. They had
strong emotions, tender at times, and each expressed
them according to the original gift of his race, some by
short cries, others by continuous babble. But they did
not command or guide their impressions ; they sang or
conversed by impulse, at random, according to the bent
of their disposition, leaving their ideas to present
themselves as they might, and when they hit upon
order, it was ignorantly and involuntarily. Here for
the first time appears a superiority of intellect, which
at the instant of conception suddenly halts, rises above
itself, passes judgment, and says to itself, " This phrase
tells the same thing as the last — remove it ; these two
ideas are disjointed — connect them ; this description
is feeble — reconsider it." When a man can speak thus
he has an idea, not learned in the schools, but personal
and practical, of the human mind, its process and needs,
and of things also, their composition and combinations ;
he has a style, that is, he is capable of making every-
thing understood and seen by the human mind. He
can extract from every object, landscape, situation, char-
acter, the special and significant marks, so as to group
and arrange them, in order to compose an artificial
work which surpasses the natural work in its purity
and completeness. He is capable, as Chaucer was, of
seeking out in the old common forest of the middle-
ages, stories and legends, to replant them in his own
soil, and make them send out new shoots. He has the
right and the power, as Chaucer had, of copying and
translating, because by dint of retouching he impresses
011 his translations and copies his original mark; he
VOL. i. p

210 THE SOURCE. BOOK i.

re-creates what he imitates, because through or by the
side of worn-out fancies and monotonous stories, he can
display, as Chaucer did, the charming ideas of an
amiable and elastic mind, the thirty master-forms of
the fourteenth century, the splendid freshness of the
verdurous landscape and spring-time of England. He
is not far from conceiving an idea of truth and life.
He is on the brink of independent thought and fertile
discovery. This was Chaucer's position. At the dis-
tance of a century and a half, he has affinity with the
poets of Elizabeth1 by his gallery of pictures, and with
the reformers of the sixteenth century by his portrait
of the good parson.

Affinity merely. He advanced a few steps beyond
the threshold of his art, but he paused at the end of the
vestibule. He half opens the great door of the temple,
but does not take his seat there ; at most, he sat down in
it only at intervals. In Arcite and Palamon, in Troilus
and Cressida, he sketches sentiments, but does not create
characters ; he easily and naturally traces the winding
course of events and conversations, but does not mark the
precise outline of a striking figure. If occasionally, as in
the description of the temple of Mars, after the Thebaid
of Statius, feeling at his back the glowing breeze of
poetry, he draws out his feet, clogged with the mud of
the middle-age, and at a bound stands upon the poetic
plain on which Statius imitated Virgil and equalled
Lucan, he, at other times, again falls back into the
childish gossip of the trouveres, or the dull gabble of

1 Tennyson, in his Dream of Fair Women, sings :

" Dan Chaucer, the first warbler, whose sweet breath
Preluded those melodious bursts, that fill
The spacious times of great Elizabeth
With sounds that echo still."— TE.

CHAP. HI. THE JNE\V TONGUE. 211

learned clerks — to " Dan Phebus or Apollo-Delphicus."
Elsewhere, a commonplace remark on art intrudes in
the midst of an impassioned description. He uses three
thousand verses to conduct Troilus to his first interview.
He is like a precocious and poetical child, who mingles
in his love-dieams quotations from his grammar and
recollections of his alphabet.1 Even in the Canterbury
Tales he repeats himself, unfolds artless developments,
forgets to concentrate his passion or his idea. He
begins a jest, and scarcely ends it. He dilutes a bright
colouring in a monotonous stanza. His voice is like
that of a boy breaking into manhood. At first a manly
and firm accent is maintained, then a shrill sweet sound
shows that his growth is not finished, and that his
strength is subject to weakness. Chaucer sets out as
if to quit the middle-age ; but in the end he is there
still. To-day he composes the Canterbury Tales ; yester-
day he was translating the Roman de la Rose. To-day
he is studying the complicated machinery of the heart,
discovering the issues of primitive education or of the
ruling disposition, and creating the comedy of manners ;
to-morrow, he will have no pleasure but in curious
events, smooth allegories, amorous discussions, imitated
from the French, or learned moralities from the ancients.
Alternately he is an observer and a trouvere ; instead
of the step he ought to have advanced, he has but made
a half-step.

Who has prevented him, and the others who sur-

1 Speaking of Cressida, rv., book i. p. 236, he says :
" Right as our first letter is now an a,
In beautie first so stood she makeles,
Her goodly looking gladed all the prees,
Nas never seene thing to be praised so den*,
Nor under cloude blacke so bright a sterre. "

212 THE SOURCE. BOOK i.

round him ? We meet with the obstacle in the tales
he has translated of Melibeus, of the Parson, in his
Testament of Love ; in short, so long as he writes verse,
he is at his ease ; as soon as he takes to prose, a sort
of chain winds around his feet and stops him. His
imagination is free, and his reasoning a slave. The
rigid scholastic divisions, the mechanical manner of
arguing and replying, the ergo, -the Latin quotations,
the authority of Aristotle and the Fathers, come and
weigh down his budding thought. His native invention
disappears under the discipline imposed. The servitude
is so heavy, that even in the work of one of his con-
temporaries, the Testament of Love, which, for a long
time, was believed to be written by Chaucer, amid the
most touching plaints and the most smarting pains, the
beautiful ideal lady, the heavenly mediator who appears
in a vision, Love, sets her theses, establishes that the
cause of a cause is the cause of the thing caused, and
reasons as pedantically as they would at Oxford. In
what can talent, even feeling, end, when it is kept down,
by such shackles ? What succession of original truths
and new doctrines could be found and proved, when in
a moral tale, like that of Melibeus and his wife Prudence,
it was thought necessary to establish a formal contro-
versy, to quote Seneca and Job, to forbid tears, to bring
forward the weeping Christ to authorise tears, to enumer-
ate every proof, to call in Solomon, Cassiodorus, and
Cato ; in short, to write a book for schools ? The public
cares only for pleasant and lively thoughts ; not serious
and general ideas ; these latter are for a special class
only. As soon as Chaucer gets into a reflective mood,
straightway Saint Thomas, Peter Lombard, the manual
of sins, the treatise on definition and syllogism, the

CHAP. in. THE NEW TONGUE. 213

army of the ancients and of the Fathers, descend from
their glory, enter his brain, speak in his stead ; and the
trouvere's pleasant voice becomes the dogmatic and
sleep-inspiring voice of a doctor. In love and satire
he has experience, and he invents ; in what regards
morality and philosophy he has learning, and copies.
For an instant, by a solitary leap, he entered upon the
close observation and the genuine study of man ; he
could not keep his ground, he did not take his seat, he
took a poetic excursion ; and no one followed him. The
level of the century is lower; he is on it himself for
the most part. He is in the company of narrators like
Froissart, of elegant speakers like Charles of Orleans,
of gossipy and barren verse- writers like Gower, Lydgate,
and Occleve. There is no fruit, but frail and fleeting
blossom, many useless branches, still more dying or
dead branches; such is this literature. And why?
Because it had no longer a root ; after three centuries
of effort, a heavy instrument cut it underground. This
instrument was the Scholastic Philosophy.

VI.

Beneath every literature there is a philosophy.
Beneath every work of art is an idea of nature and of
life.; this idea leads the poet. Whether the author
knows it or not, he writes in order to exhibit it ; and
the characters which he fashions, like the events which
he arranges, only serve to bring to light the dim creative
conception which raises and combines them. Under-
lying Homer appears the noble life of heroic paganism
and of happy Greece. Underlying Dante, the sad arid
violent life of fanatical Catholicism and of the much-
hating Italians. From either we might draw a theory

214 THE SOURCE. BOOK i

of man and of the beautiful. It is so with others ; and
this is how, according to the variations, the birth,
blossom, decline, or sluggishness of the master-idea,
literature varies, is bom, nourishes, degenerates, comes
to an end. Whoever plants the one, plants the other :
whoever undermines the one, undermines the other.
Place in all the minds of any age a new grand idea of
nature and life, so that they feel and produce it with
their whole heart and strength, and you will see them,
seized with the craving to express it, invent forms of
art and groups of figures. Take away from these minds
every grand new idea of nature and life, and you will
see them, deprived of the craving to express all-important
thoughts, copy, sink into silence, or rave.

What has become of these all-important thoughts ?
What labour worked them out ? What studies nourished
them? The labourers did not lack zeal. In the
twelfth century the energy of their minds was admirable.
At Oxford there were thirty thousand scholars. No
building in Paris could contain the crowd of Abelard's
disciples ; when he retired to solitude, they accompanied
him in such a multitude, that the desert became a town.
No difficulty repulsed them. There is a story of a
young boy, who, though beaten by his master, was
wholly bent on remaining with him, that he might still
learn. When the terrible encyclopedia of Aristotle was
introduced, though disfigured and unintelligible, it was
devoured. The only question presented to them, that
of universals, so abstract and dry, so embarrassed by
Arabic obscurities and Greek subtilties, during cen-
turies, was seized upon eagerly. Heavy and awkward
as was the instrument supplied to them, I mean syllo-
gism, they made themselves masters of it, rendered it

CHAP. HI. THE NEW TONGUE. 215

still more heavy, plunged it into every object and in
every direction. They constructed monstrous books,
in great numbers, cathedrals of syllogism, of unheard of
architecture, of prodigious finish, heightened in effect by
intensity of intellectual power, which the whole sum of
human labour has only twice been able to match.1
These young and valiant minds thought they had found
the temple of truth ; they rushed at it headlong, in
legions, breaking in the doors, clambering over the
walls, leaping into the interior, and so found themselves
at the bottom of a moat. Three centuries of labour at
the bottom of this black moat added not one idea to the
human mind.

For consider the questions which they treat of.
They seem to be marching, but are merely marking
time. People would say, to see them moil and toil,
that they will educe from heart and brain some great
original creed, and yet all belief was imposed upon them
from the outset. The system was made ; they could only
arrange and comment upon it. The conception comes
not from them, but from Constantinople. Infinitely
complicated and subtle as it is, the supreme work of
Oriental mysticism and Greek metaphysics, so dispro-
portioned to their young understanding, they exhaust
themselves to reproduce it, and moreover burden their
unpractised hands with the weight of a logical instru-
ment which Aristotle created for theory and not for
practice, and which ought to have remained in a

1 Under Proclus and under Hegel. Duns Scotus, at the age of thirty-
one, died, leaving beside his sermons and commentaries, twelve folio
volumes, in a small close handwriting, in a style like Hegel's, on the
same subject as Proclus treats of. Similarly with Saint Thomas and
the whole train of schoolmen. No idea can be formed of auch a labour
before handling the books themselves.

216 THE SOURCE. BOOK i

cabinet of philosophical curiosities, without being ever
carried into the field of action. " Whether the divine
essence engendered the Son, or was engendered by the
Father; why the three persons together are not greater
than one alone; attributes determine persons, not
substance, that is, nature ; how properties can exist in
the nature of God, and not determine it ; if created
spirits are local and can be circumscribed ; if God can
know more things than He is aware of ; " l — these are
the ideas which they moot : what truth could issue
thence ? From hand to hand the chimera grows, and
spreads wider its gloomy wings. " Can God cause that,
the place and body being retained, the body shall have
no position, that is, existence in place ? — Whether the
impossibility of being engendered is a constituent
property of the First Person of the Trinity — Whether
identity, similitude, and equality are real relations in
God." 2 Duns Scotus distinguishes three kinds of
matter: matter which is firstly first, secondly first,
thirdly first. According to him, we must clear this
triple hedge of thorny abstractions in order to under-
stand the production of a sphere of brass. Under such
a regimen, imbecility soon makes its appearance. Saint
Thomas himself considers, " whether the body of Christ
arose with its wounds, — whether this body moves with
the motion of the host and the chalice in consecration,
— whether at the first instant of conception Christ had
the use of free judgment, — whether Christ was slain
by Himself or by another?" Do you think you are
at the limits of human folly ? Listen. He considers
" whether the dove in which the Holy Spirit appeared

1 Peter Lombard, Book of Sentences. It was the classic of the
middJe-age. 2 Duns Scotus, ed. 1639.

CHAP. in. THE NEW TONGUE. 217

was a real animal, — whether a glorified body can occupy
one and the same place at the same time as anothei
glorified body, — whether in the state of innocence all
children were masculine ? " I pass over others as to
the digestion of Christ, and some still more untranslat-
able.1 This is the point reached by the most esteemed
doctor, the most judicious mind, the Bossuet of the
middle-age. Even in this ring of inanities the answers are
laid down. Roscellinus and Abelard were excommuni-
cated, exiled, imprisoned, because they swerved from it.
There is a complete minute dogma which closes all
issues ; there is no means of escaping ; after a hundred
wriggles and a hundred efforts, you must come and
tumble into a formula. If by mysticism you try
to fly over their heads, if by experience you en-
deavour to creep beneath, powerful talons await you at
your exit. The wise man passes for a magician, the
enlightened man for a heretic. The Waldenses, the
Catharists, the disciples of John of Parma, were burned :
Roger Bacon died only just in time, otherwise he might
have been burned. Under this constraint men ceased
to think ; for he who speaks of thought, speaks of an
effort at invention, an indiAridual creation, an energetic
action. They recite a lesson, or sing a catechism ; even
in paradise, even in ecstasy and the divinest raptures of
love, Dante thinks himself bound to show an exact
memory and a scholastic orthodoxy. How then with

1 Utrum angelus diligat se ipsuin dilectione natural! vel electiva ?
IJtrum in statu innocentise fuerit generatio per coitura ? Utrum omnes
fuissent nati in sexu masculmo ? Utrum cognitio angeli posset dici
matutina et vespertina ? Utrum martyribus aureola debeatur ? Utrum
virgo Maria fuerit virgo in concipiendo ? Utrum remanserit virgo post
partum ? The reader may look out in the text the reply to these last
two questions. (S. Thomas, Summa Theologica, ed. 1677.)

218 THE SOUKCE. BOOK L

the rest ? Some, like Kaymond Lully, set about in-
venting an instrument of reasoning to serve in place of
the understanding. About the fourteenth century,
under the blows of Occam, this verbal science began to
totter ; they saw that its entities were only words ; it
was discredited. In 1 3 6 7, at Oxford, of thirty thousand
students, there remained six thousand;1 they still set
their " Barbara and Felapton," but only in the way of
routine. Each one in turn mechanically traversed the
petty region of threadbare cavils, scratched himself in
the briars of quibbles, and burdened himself with his
bundle of texts; nothing more. The vast body of
science which was to have formed and vivified the whole
thought of man, was reduced to a text-book.

So, little by little, the conception which fertilised and
ruled all others, dried up; the deep spring, whence
flowed all poetic streams, was found empty; science
furnished nothing more to the world. What further
works could the world produce ? As Spain, later on,
renewing the middle-age, after having shone splendidly
and foolishly by her chivalry and devotion, by Lope de
Vega and Calderon, Loyola and St. Theresa, became
enervated through the Inquisition and through casuistry,
and ended by sinking into a brutish silence; so the
middle-age, outstripping Spain, after displaying the
senseless heroism of the crusades, and the poetical
ecstasy of the cloister, after producing chivalry and saint-
ship, Francis of Assisi, St. Louis, and Dante, languished
under the Inquisition and the scholastic learning, and
became extinguished in idle raving and inanity.

1 The Rev. Henry Anstey, in his Introduction to Munim&nta Aca-
demica,, Lond. 1868, says that "the statement of Richard of Armagh
that there were in the thirteenth century 30.000 scholars at Oxford is
almost incredible." P. xlviii. — TR.

CHAP. m. THE NEW TONGUE. 219

Must we quote all these good people who speak
without having anything to say ? You may find them
in Warton;1 dozens of translators, importing the
poverties of French literature, and imitating imitations ;
rhyming chroniclers, most commonplace of men, whom
we only read because we must accept history from
every quarter, even from imbeciles; spinners and
spinsters of didactic poems, who pile up verses on the
training of falcons, on heraldry, on chemistry; editors
of moralities, who invent the same dream over again
for the hundredth time, and get themselves taught
universal history by the goddess Sapience. Like the
writers of the Latin decadence, these folk only think of
copying, compiling, abridging, constructing in text-books,
in rhymed memoranda, the encyclopedia of their times.

Listen to the most illustrious, the grave Gower —
" morall Gower," as he was called ? 2 Doubtless here
and there he contains a remnant of brilliancy and grace.
He is like an old secretary of a Court of Love, Andre"
le Chapelain or any other, who would pass the day in
solemnly registering the sentences of ladies, and in the
evening, partly asleep on his desk, would see in a half-
dream their sweet smile and their beautiful eyes.3 The
ingenious but exhausted vein of Charles of Orleans
still flows in his French ballads. He has the same
fondling delicacy, almost a little affected. The poor
little poetic spring flows yet in thin transparent stream-
lets over the smooth pebbles, and murmurs with a
babble, pretty, but so low that at times you cannot
hear it. But dull is the rest ! His great poem, Con-

1 Hist, of English Poetry, vol. ii.

» Contemporary with Chaucer. The Confessio Amantis dates from
3 History of Rosiphele. Ballads,

220 THE SOURCE. BOOK i.

fessw Amantis, is a dialogue between a lover and his
confessor, imitated chiefly from Jean de Meung, having
for object, like the Roman de la Rose, to explain and
classify the impediments of love. The superannuated
theme is always reappearing, covered by a crude erudi-
tion. You will find here an exposition of hermetic
science, lectures on the philosophy of Aristotle, a
treatise on politics, a litany of ancient and modern
legends gleaned from the compilers, marred in the
passage by the pedantry of the schools and the igno-
rance of the age. It is a cartload of scholastic rubbish ;
the sewer tumbles upon this feeble spirit, which of
itself was flowing clearly, but now, obstructed by tiles,
bricks, plaster, ruins from all quarters of the globe,
drags on darkened and sluggish. Gower, one of the
most learned of his time,1 supposed that Latin was
invented by the old prophetess Carmen tis ; that the
grammarians, Aristarchus, Donatus, and Didymus, regu-
lated its syntax, pronunciation, and prosody; that it
was adorned by Cicero with the flowers of eloquence
and rhetoric ; then enriched by translations from the
Arabic, Chaldsean, and Greek; and that at last, after
much labour of celebrated writers, it attained its final
perfection in Ovid, the poet of love. Elsewhere he
discovers that Ulysses learned rhetoric from Cicero,
magic from Zoroaster, astronomy from Ptolemy, and
philosophy from Plato. And what a style ! so long, so
dull,2 so drawn out by repetitions, the most minute
details, garnished with references to his text, like a man
who, with his eyes glued to his Aristotle and his Ovid,

1 Warton, ii. 240.

3 See, for instance, his description of the sun's crown, the most
poetical passage in book vii.

CHAI>. in. THE NEW TONGUE. 221

a slave of his musty parchments, can do nothing but
copy and string his rhymes together. Schoolboys even
in old age, they seem to believe that every truth, all
wit, is in their great wood-bound books ; that they
have no need to find out and invent for themselves;
that their whole business is to repeat ; that this is, in
fact, man's business. The scholastic system had en-
throned the dead letter, and peopled the world with
dead understandings.

After Gower come Occleve and Lydgate.1 "My
father Chaucer would willingly have taught me," say?
Occleve, " but I was dull, and learned little or nothing."
He paraphrased in verse a treatise of Egidius, on govern-
ment ; these are moralities. There are others, on com-
passion, after Augustine, and on the art of dying ; then
love-tales ; a letter from Cupid, dated from his court in
the month of May. Love and moralities,2 that is,
abstractions and affectation, were the taste of the time ;
and so, in the time of Lebrun, of Esme"nard, at the close
of contemporaneous French literature,3 they produced
collections of didactic poems, and odes to Chloris. As
for the monk Lydgate, he had some talent, some imagina-
tion, especially in high-toned descriptions : it was the
last nicker of a dying literature ; gold received a golden
coating, precious stones were placed upon diamonds,
ornaments multiplied and made fantastic ; as in their
dress and buildings, so in their style.4 Look at the
costumes of Henry IV. and Henry V., monstrous heart-
shaped or horn-shaped head-dresses, long sleeves covered

1 1420, 1430.

8 This is the title Froissart (1397) gave to his collection when pre-
senting it to Richard II. 3 Lebrun, 1729-1807; Esme"nard, 1770-1812.

4 Lydgate, The Destruction, of Troy — description of Hector's chapeL
Especially read the Pageants or Solemn Entries.

222 THE SOURCE. BOOK L

with ridiculous designs, the plumes, and again the
oratories, armorial tombs, little gaudy chapels, like con-
spicuous flowers under the naves of the Gothic perpen-
dicular. When we can no more speak to the soul, we
try to speak to the eyes. This is what Lydgate does,
nothing more. Pageants or shows are required of him.
" disguisings" for the Company of goldsmiths ; a mask
before the king, a May-entertainment for the sheriffs of
London, a drama of the creation for the festival of Corpus
Christi, a masquerade, a Christmas show ; he gives the
plan and furnishes the verses. In this matter he never
runs dry ; two hundred and fifty-one poems are attri-
buted to him. Poetry thus conceived becomes a
manufacture ; it is composed by the yard. Such was
the judgment of the Abbot of St. Albans, who, having
got him to translate a legend in verse, pays a hundred
shillings for the whole, verse, writing, and illuminations,
placing the three works on a level. In fact, no more
thought was required for the one than for the others.
His three great works, The Fall of Princes, The, Destruction
of Troy, and The Siege of Thebes, are only translations or
paraphrases, verbose, erudite, descriptive, a kind of chival-
rous processions, coloured for the twentieth time, in the
same manner, on the same vellum. The only point
which rises above the average, at least in the first poem,
is the idea of Fortune,1 and the violent vicissitudes of
human life. If there was a philosophy at this time,
this* was it. They willingly narrated horrible and tragic
histories; gather them from antiquity down to their
own day ; they were far from the trusting and passionate
piety which felt the hand of God in the government of

1 See the Vision of Fortune, a gigantic figure. In this painting he
shows both feeling and talent.

CHAP. HI. THE NEW TONGUE. 223

the world; they saw that the world went blundering
here and there like a drunken man. A sad and gloomy
world, amused by eternal pleasures, oppressed with a
dull misery, which suffered and feared without consola-
tion or hope, isolated between the ancient spirit in
which it had no living hope, and the modern spirit
whose active science it ignored. Fortune, like a black
smoke, hovers over all, and shuts out the sight of heaven.
They picture it as follows : —

" Her face semyng cruel and terrible

And by disdaynfc menacing of loke, . . .

An hundred handes she had, of eche part . . .

Some of her handes lyft up men alofte,

To hye estate of worldlye dignite ;

Another handk griped ful unsofte,

Which cast another in grete adversite." l

They look upon the great unhappy ones, a captive king,
a dethroned queen, assassinated princes, noble cities
destroyed,2 lamentable spectacles as exhibited in Ger-
many and France, and of which there will be plenty in
England ; and they can only regard them with a harsh
resignation. Lydgate ends by reciting a commonplace
of mechanical piety, by way of consolation. The reader
makes the sign of the cross, yawns, and goes away. In
fact, poetry and religion are no longer capable of sug-
gesting a genuine sentiment. Authors copy, and copy
again. Hawes3 copies the House of Fame of Chaucer,
and a sort of allegorical amorous poem, after the Roman
de la Eose. Barclay4 translates the Mirror of Good

1 Lydgate, Fall of Princes. Warton, ii 280.
a The War of the Hussites, The Hundred Years' War, and The Wai
of the Roses.

s About 1506. The Temple of Glass. Passetyme of Pleasure.
* About 1500.

224 THE SOURCE. BOOK L

Manners and the Ship of Fools. Continually we meet
with dull abstractions, used up and barren ; it is the
scholastic phase of poetry. If anywhere there is an
accent of greater originality, it is in this Ship of Fools,
and in Lydgate's Dance of Death, bitter buffooneries, sad
gaieties, which, in the hands of artists and poets, were
having their run throughout Europe. They mock at
each other, grotesquely and gloomily ; poor, dull, and
vulgar figures, shut up in a ship, or made to dance
on their tomb to the sound of a fiddle, played by a
grinning skeleton. At the end of all this mouldy talk,
and amid the disgust which they have conceived for
each other, a clown, a tavern Triboulet,1 composer of
little jeering and macaronic verses, Skelton2 makes his
appearance, a virulent pamphleteer, who, jumbling
together French, English, Latin phrases, with slang,
and fashionable words, invented words, intermingled
with short rhymes, fabricates a sort of literary mud, with
which he bespatters Wolsey and the bishops. Style,
metre, rhyme, language, art of every kind, is at an end ;
beneath the vain parade of official style there is only a
heap of rubbish. Yet, as he says,

" Though my rhyme be ragged,
Tattered and gagged,
Rudely rain-beaten,
Rusty, moth-eaten,
Yf ye take welle therewithe.
It hath in it some pithe."

It is full of political animus, sensual liveliness, English

1 The court fool in Victor Hugo's drama of Le Hoi s'amuse.—TR.

2 "Died 1529 ; Poet-Laureate 1489. His Bouge of Court, his Grown
yf Laurel, his Elegy on the Death of the Earl of Northumberland, are
well written, and belong to official poetry.

CHAP. in. THE NEW TONGUE. 225

and popular instincts ; it lives. It is a coarse life, still
elementary, swarming with ignoble vermin, like that
which appears in a great decomposing body. It is life,
nevertheless, with its two great features which it is
destined to display : the hatred of the ecclesiastical
hierarchy, which is the Reformation ; the return to the
senses and to natural life, which is the Renaissance.

VOL. i. Q

BOOK II
THE KENAISSANCK

CHAPTEK I.

3&enai00ance.

§ 1. MANNERS OF THE TIME.

I.

FOR seventeen centuries a deep and sad thought had
weighed upon the spirit of man, first to overwhelm it,
then to exalt and to weaken it, never loosing its hold
throughout this long space of time. It was the idea of
the weakness and decay of the human race. Greek cor-
niption, Roman oppression, and the dissolution of the
ancient world, had given rise to it ; it, in its turn, had
produced a stoical resignation, an- epicurean indifference,
Alexandrian mysticism, and the Christian hope in the
kingdom of God. " The world is evil and lost, let us
escape by insensibility, amazement, ecstasy." Thus
spoke the philosophers ; and religion, coming after,
announced that the end was near : " Prepare, for the
kingdom of God is at hand." Tor a thousand years
universal ruin incessantly drove still deeper into their
hearts this gloomy thought ; and when man in the

228 THE RENAISSANCE. BOOK u

feudal state raised himself, by sheer force of courage and
muscles, from the depths of final imbecility and general
misery, he discovered his thought and his work fettered
by the crushing idea, which, forbidding a life of nature
and worldly hopes, erected into ideals the obedience of
the monk and the dreams of fanatics.

It grew ever worse and worse. For the natural result
of such a conception, as of the miseries which engender it,
and the discouragement which it gives rise to, is to do
away with personal action, and to replace originality by
submission. From the fourth century, gradually the
dead letter was substituted for the living faith. Chris-
tians resigned themselves into the hands of the clergy,
they into the hands of the Pope. Christian opinions
were subordinated to theologians, and theologians to the
Fathers. Christian faith was reduced to the accomplish-
ment of works, and works to the accomplishment of
ceremonies. Eeligion, fluid during the first centuries,
was now congealed into a hard crystal, and the coarse
contact of the barbarians had deposited upon its surface
a layer of idolatry : theocracy and the Inquisition, the
monopoly of the clergy and the prohibition of the
Scriptures, the worship of relics and the sale of indul-
gences began to appear. In place of Christianity, the
church ; in place of a free creed, enforced orthodoxy ; in
place of moral fervour, fixed religious practices ; in place
of the heart and stirring thought, outward and mechanical
discipline : such are the characteristics of the middle ages.
Under this constraint thinking society had ceased to
think ; philosophy was turned into a text-book, and
poetry into dotage ; and mankind, slothful and crouch-
ing, delivering up their conscience and their conduct
into the hands of their priests, seemed but as puppets,

CHAP. i. THE PAGAN RENAISSANCE. 229

fit only for reciting a catechism and mumbling over
beads.1

At last invention makes another start ; and it makes
it by the efforts of the lay society, which rejected
theocracy, kept the State free, and which presently dis-
covered, or re-discovered, one after another, the indus-
tries, sciences, and arts. All was renewed ; America and
the Indies were added to the map of the world ; the
shape of the earth was ascertained, the system of the
universe propounded, modern philology was inaugurated,
the experimental sciences set on foot, art and literature
shot forth like a harvest, religion was transformed :
there was no province of human intelligence and action
which was not refreshed and fertilised by this universal
effort. It was so great, that it passed from the innova-
tors to the laggards, and reformed Catholicism in the
face of Protestantism which it formed. It seems as
though men had suddenly opened their eyes and seen.
In fact, they attain a new and superior kind of intelli-
gence. It is the proper feature of this age, that men
no longer make themselves masters of objects by bits,
or isolated, or through scholastic or mechanical classi-
fications, but as a whole, in general and complete views,
with the eager grasp of a sympathetic spirit, which being
placed before a vast object, penetrates it in all its parts,
tries it in all its relations, appropriates and assimilates
it, impresses upon itself its living and potent image, so
life-like and so powerful, that it is fain to translate it
into externals through a work of art or an action. An
extraordinary warmth of soul, a superabundant and

1 See, at Bruges, the pictures of Hemling (fifteenth century). No
paintings enable us to understand so well the ecclesiastical piety of the
iiv'ddle-age, which was altogether like that of the Buddhists.

230 THE KENAISSANCE. BOOK IL

splendid imagination, reveries, visions, artists, believers,
founders, creators, — that is what such a form of intellect
produces ; for to create we must have, as had Luther
and Loyola, Michel Angelo and Shakspeare, an idea, not
abstract, partial, and dry, but well denned, finished,
sensible, — a true creation, which acts inwardly, and
struggles to appear to the light. This was Europe's
grand age, and the most notable epoch of human growth.
To this day we live from its sap, we only carry on its
pressure and efforts.

II.

When human power is manifested so clearly and in
such great works, it is no wonder if the ideal changes,
and the old pagan idea reappears. It recurs, bringing
with it the worship of beauty and vigour, first in Italy ;
for this, of all countries in Europe, is the most pagan,
and the nearest to the ancient civilisation ; thence in
France and Spain, and Flanders,1 and even in Germany ;
and finally in England. How is it propagated ? What
revolution of manners reunited mankind at this time,
everywhere, under a sentiment which they had forgotten
for fifteen hundred years ? Merely that their condition
had improved, and they felt it. The idea ever expresses
the actual situation, and the creatures of the imagination,
like the conceptions of the mind, only manifest the state
of society and the degree of its welfare ; there is a fixed
connection between what man admires and what he is.
While misery overwhelms him, while the decadence is
visible, and hope shut out, he is inclined to curse his
life on earth, and seek consolation in another sphere.

1 Van Orley, Michel Coxcie, Franz Floris, the de Vos', the Sadelere,
Crispin de Pass, and the artists of Nuremberg.

CHAP. i. THE PAGAN RENAISSANCE. 231

As soon as his sufferings are alleviated, his power made
manifest, his prospects brightened, he begins once more
to love the present life, to be self-confident, to love and
praise energy, genius, all the effective faculties which
labour to procure him happiness. About the twentieth
year of Elizabeth's reign, the nobles gave up shield and
two-handed sword for the rapier j1 a little, almost im-
perceptible fact, yet vast, for it is like the change which
sixty years ago, made us give up the sword at court,
to leave us with our arms swinging about in our black
coats. In fact, it was the close of feudal life, and the
beginning of court-life, just as to-day court-life is at an
end, and the democratic reign has begun. With the
two-handed swords, heavy coats of mail, feudal keeps,
private warfare, permanent disorder, all the scourges of
the middle-age retired, and faded into the past. The
English had done with the Wars of the Eoses. They
no longer ran the risk of being pillaged to-morrow for
being rich, and hung the next day for being traitors ;
they have no further need to furbish up their armour,
make alliances with powerful nations, lay in stores for
the winter, gather together men-at-arms, scour the
country to plunder and hang others.2 The monarchy, in
England as throughout Europe, establishes peace in the
community,3 and with peace appear the useful arts.
Domestic comfort follows civil security ; and man, better
furnished in his home, better protected in his hamlet,

1 The first carriage was in 1564. It caused much astonishment
Some said that it was " a great sea-shell brought from China ; " others,
" that it was a temple in which cannibals worshipped the devil."

3 For a picture of this state of things, see Fenn's Paston Letters.

3 Louis XI. in France, Ferdinand and Isabella in Spain, Henry VII.
in England. In Italy the feudal regime ended earlier, by the establish-
ment of republics and principalities.

^32 THE RENAISSANCE. BOOK n.

takes pleasure in his life on earth, which he has changed,
and means to change.

Toward the close of the fifteenth century ] the im-
petus was given ; commerce and the woollen trade made
a sudden advance, and such an enormous one that corn-
fields were changed into pasture-lands, " whereby the
inhabitants of the said town (Manchester) have gotten and
come into riches and wealthy livings," 2 so that in 1553,
40,000 pieces of cloth were exported in English ships.
It was already the England which we see to day, a land
of green meadows, intersected by hedgerows, crowded
with cattle, and abounding in ships — a manufacturing
opulent land, with a people of beef-eating toilers, who
enrich it while they enrich themselves. They improved
agriculture to such an extent, that in half-a-century
the produce of an acre was doubled. 3 They grew so
rich, that at the beginning of the reign of Charles I.
the Commons represented three times the wealth of the
Upper House. The ruin of Antwerp by the Duke of
Parma4 sent to England " the third part of the merchants
and manufacturers, who made silk, damask, stockings,
taffetas, and serges." The defeat of the Armada and
the decadence of Spain opened the seas to English mer-
chants.5 The toiling hive, who would dare, attempt,
explore, act in unison, and always with profit, was

1 1488, Act of Parliament on Enclosures.

2 A Compendious Examination, 1581, by "William Straff ord. Act of
Parliament, 1541.

3 Between 1377 and 1588 the increase was from two and a half to
five millions. * Jn 1585 ; Ludovic Guicciardini.

6 Henry VIII. at the beginning of his reign had but one ship of war.
Elizabeth sent out one hundred and fifty against the Armada. In 1553
was founded a company to trade with Russia. In 1578 Drake circum-
navigated the globe. In 1600 the East India Company was founded.

CHAP. i. THE PAGAN RENAISSANCE. 233

about to reap its advantages and set out on its voyages,
buzzing over the universe.

At the base and on the summit of society, in all
ranks of life, in all grades of human condition, this new
welfare became visible. In 1534, considering that the
streets of London were " very noyous and foul, and in
many places thereof very jeopardous to all people pass-
ing and repassing, as well on horseback as on foot,"
Henry VIII. began the paving of the city. New streets
covered the open spaces where the young men used to run
races and to wrestle. Every year the number of taverns,
theatres, gambling rooms, bear-gardens, increased. Be-
fore the time of Elizabeth the country-houses of gentle-
men were , little more than straw-thatched cottages,
plastered with the coarsest clay, lighted only by trellises.
"Howbeit," says Harrison (1580), "such as be latelie
builded are commonlie either of bricke or hard stone,
or both ; their roomes large and comelie, and houses of
office further distant from their lodgings." The old
wooden houses were covered with plaster, " which, beside
the delectable whitenesse of the stuffe itselfe, is laied
on so even and smoothlie, as nothing in my judgment
can be done with more exactnesse." J This open admi-
ration shows from what hovels they had escaped. Glass
was at last employed for windows, and the bare walls
were covered with hangings, on which visitors might
see, with delight and astonishment, plants, animals,
figures. They began to use stoves, and experienced the
unwonted pleasure of being warm. Harrison notes three
important changes which had taken place in the farm-
houses of his time :

" One is, the multitude of chimnies lately erected, whereas in
1 Nathan Drake, Shakspeare and his Times, 1817, i. v. 72 et passim.

234 THE RENAISSANCE. BOOK IL

their yoong dales there were not above two or three, if so manie,
in most uplandishe townes of the realme. . . . The second is
the great (although not generall), amendment of lodging, for our
fathers (yea and we ourselves also) have lien full oft upon straw
pallets, on rough mats covered onelie with a sheet, under cover-
lets made of dagswain, or hop-harlots, and a good round log
under their heads, insteed of a bolster or pillow. If it were so
that the good man of the house, had within seven yeares after
his marriage purchased a matteres or flockebed, and thereto a
sacke of chaffe to rest his head upon, he thought himselfe to be
as well lodged as the lord of the towne. . . . Pillowes (said they)
were thought meet onelie for women in childbed. . . . The
third thing is the exchange of vessell, as of treene platters into
pewter, and wodden spoones into silver or tin ; for so common
was all sorts of treene stuff in old time, that a man should
hardlie find four peeces of pewter (of which one was perad venture
a salt) in a good farmers house. " l

It is not possession, but acquisition, which gives men
pleasure and sense of power ; they observe sooner a
small happiness, new to them, than a great happiness
which is old. It is not when all is good, but when all
is better, that they see the bright side of life, and are
tempted to make a holiday of it. This is why at this
period they did make a holiday of it, a splendid show,
so like a picture that it fostered painting in Italy, so
like a piece of acting, that it produced the drama in
England. Now that the axe and sword of the civil
wars had beaten down the independent nobility, and the
abolition of the law of maintenance had destroyed the
petty royalty of each great feudal baron, the lords
quitted their sombre castles, battlemented fortresses,
surrounded by stagnant water, pierced with narrow
windows, a sort of stone breastplates of no use but to

1 Nathan Drake, Shakspeare and his Times, i. r. 102.

CHAP. i. THE PAGAN RENAISSANCE. 235

preserve the life of their master. They flock into new
palaces, with vaulted roofs and turrets, covered with
fantastic and manifold ornaments, adorned with terraces
and vast staircases, with gardens, fountains, statues, such
as were the palaces of Henry VIII. and Elizabeth, half
Gothic and half Italian,1 whose convenience, splendour,
and symmetry announced already habits of society and
the taste for pleasure. They came to court and aban-
doned their old manners ; the four meals which scarcely
sufficed their former voracity were reduced to two;
gentlemen soon became refined, placing th'eir glory in
the elegance and singularity of their amusements aiid
their clothes. They dressed magnificently in splendid
materials, with the luxury of men who rustle silk and
make gold sparkle for the first time : doublets of scarlet
satin ; cloaks of sable, costing a thousand ducats ; velvet
shoes, embroidered with gold and silver, covered with
rosettes and ribbons ; boots with falling tops, from
whence hung a cloud of lace, embroidered with figures
of birds, animals, constellations, flowers in silver, gold,
or precious stones ; ornamented shirts costing ten pounds
a piece. " It is a common thing to put a thousand
goats and a hundred oxen on a coat, and to carry a
whole manor on one's back." 2 The costumes of the
time were like shrines. When Elizabeth died, they
found three thousand dresses in her wardrobe. Need
we speak of the monstrous ruffs of the ladies, their
puffed out dresses, their stomachers stiff with diamonds ?
As a singular sign of the times, the men were more

1 This was called the Tudor style. Under James I., in the handa
of Inigo Jones, it became entirely Italian, approaching the antique.

2 Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, 12th ed. 1821. Stubbes, Ana
}mn,ie of Abuses, ed. Turnbull, 1836.

236 THE RENAISSANCE. BOOK 11.

changeable and more bedecked than they. Harrison
says :

" Such is our mutabilitie, that to dale there is none to the
Spanish guise, to morrow the French toies are most fine and
delectable, yer long no such apparell as that which is after the
high Alman fashion, by and by the Turkish inaner is generallie
best liked of, otherwise the Morisco gowns, the Barbarian
sleeves . . . and the short French breeches. . . . And as these
fashions are diverse, so likewise it is a world to see the costli-
nesse and the curiositie ; the excesse and the vanitie ; the pompe
and the braverie ; the change and the varietie ; and finallie, the
ficklenesse and the follie that is in all degrees." l

Folly, it may have been, but poetry likewise. There
was something more than puppyism in this masquerade
of splendid costume. The overflow of inner sentiment
found this issue, as also in drama and poetry. It was
an artistic spirit which induced it. There was an
incredible outgrowth of living forms from their brains.
They acted like their engravers, who give us in their
frontispieces a prodigality of fruits, flowers, active figures,
animals, gods, and pour out and confuse the whole
treasure of nature in every corner of their paper. They
must enjoy the beautiful ; they would be happy through
their eyes ; they perceive in consequence naturally the
relief and energy of forms. From the accession of
Henry VIII. to the death of James I. we find nothing
but tournaments, processions, public en tries, masquerades.
First come the royal banquets, coronation displays, large
and noisy pleasures of Henry VIII. Wolsey entertains
hinn

" In so gorgeous a sort and costlie maner, that it was an heaven

to behold. There wanted no dames or damosels meet or apt to

1 Nathan Drake, Shakspeare and his Times, ii. 6, 87.

CHAP. i. THE PAGAN "RENAISSANCE. 237

danse with the maskers, or to garnish the place for the time :
then was there all kind of musike and harmonie, with fine
voices both of men and children. On a time the king came
suddenlie thither in a maske with a dozen maskers all in gar-
ments like sheepheards, made of fine cloth of gold, and crimosin
sattin paned, . . . having sixteene torch-bearers. ... In came
a new banket before the king wherein were served two hundred
diverse dishes, of costlie devises and subtilities. Thus passed
they foorth the night with banketting, dansing, and other
triumphs, to the great comfort of the king, and pleasant regard
of the nobilitie there assembled." 1

Count, if you can, the mythological entertainments, the
theatrical receptions, the open-air operas played before
Elizabeth, James, and their great lords.2 At Kenihvorth
the pageants lasted ten days. There was everything ;
learned recreations, novelties, popular plays, sanguinary
spectacles, coarse farces, juggling and feats of skill,
allegories, mythologies, chivalric exhibitions, rustic and
national commemorations. At the same time, in this
universal outburst and sudden expanse, men become
interested in themselves, find their life desirable, worthy
of being represented and put on the stage complete;
they play with it, delight in looking upon it, love its
ups and downs, and make of it a work of art. The
queen is received by a sibyl, then by giants of the time of
Arthur, then by the Lady of the Lake, Sylvanus, Pomona,
Ceres, and Bacchus, every divinity in turn presents her
with the first fruits of his empire. Next day, a savage,
dressed in moss and ivy, discourses before her with Echo
in her praise. Thirteen bears are set fighting against

1 Holinshed (1586), 1808, 6 vols. iii. 763 et passim.
y Holinshed, iii., Reign of Henry VIII. Elizabeth and James
Progresses, by Nichols.

238 THE RENAISSANCE. BOOK 11.

dogs. An Italian acrobat performs wonderful feats
before the whole assembly. A rustic marriage takes
place before the queen, then a sort of comic fight
amongst the peasants of Coventry, who represent the
defeat of the Danes. As she is returning from the chase,
Triton, rising from the lake, prays her, in the name of
Neptune, to deliver the enchanted lady, pursued by
a cruel knight, Syr Bruse sauns Pitee. Presently the
lady appears, surrounded by nymphs, followed close by
Proteus, who is borne by an enormous dolphin. Con-
cealed in the dolphin, a band of musicians with a chorus
of ocean-deities, sing the praise of the powerful, beautiful,
chaste queen of England.1 You perceive that comedy
is not confined to the theatre ; the great of the realm
and the queen herself become actors. The cravings of
the imagination are so keen, that the court becomes a
stage. Under James I., every year, on Twelfth-day, the
queen, the chief ladies and nobles, played a piece called
a Masque, a sort of allegory combined with dances,
heightened in effect by decorations and costumes of
great splendour, of which the mythological paintings of
Rubens can alone give an idea : —

" The attire of the lords was from the antique Greek statues.
On their heads they wore Persic crowns, that were with scrolls
of gold plate turned outward, and wreathed about with a carna-
tion and silver net-lawn. Their bodies were of carnation cloth
of silver ; to express the naked, in manner of the Greek thorax,
girt under the breasts with a broad belt of cloth of gold, fastened
with jewels ; the mantles were of coloured silke ; the first, sky-
colour ; the second, pearl-colour ; the third, flame colour : the
fourth, tawny. The ladies attire was of white cloth of silver,
wrought with Juno's birds and fruits ; a loose under garment,

1 Laneham's Entertainment at Killingworth Castle, 1575. Nichol'e
Progresses vol. i. London 1788.

CHAP. i. THE PAGAN RENAISSANCE. 239

full gathered, of carnation, striped with silver, and parted with
a golden zone ; beneath that, another flowing garment, of
watchet cloth of silver, laced with gold ; their hair carelessly
bound under the circle of a rare and rich coronet, adorned with
all variety, and choice of jewels ; from the top of which flowed a
transparent veil, down to the ground. Their shoes were azure
and gold, set with rubies and diamonds."1

I abridge the description, which is like a fairy tale.
Fancy that all these costumes, this glitter of materials,
this sparkling of diamonds, this splendour of nudities,
was displayed daily at the marriage of the great, to the
bold sounds of a pagan epithalamium. Think of the
feasts which the Earl of Carlisle introduced, where was
served first of all a table loaded with sumptuous viands,
as high as a man could reach, in order to remove it pre-
sently, and replace it by another similar table. This
prodigality of magnificence, these costly follies, this
unbridling of the imagination, this intoxication of eye
and ear, this comedy" played by the lords of the realm,
showed, like the pictures of Eubens, Jordaens, and
their Flemish contemporaries, so open an appeal to the
senses, so complete a return to nature, that our chilled
and gloomy age is scarcely able to imagine it.2

III.

To vent the feelings, to satisfy the heart and eyes, to
set free boldly on all the roads of existence the pack of
appetites and instincts, this was the craving which the
manners of the time betrayed. It was " merry England,"

1 Ben Jonson's works, ed. Gifford, 1816, 9 rols. Masque of Hymen,
vol. vii. 76.

a Certain private letters also describe the court of Elizabeth aa a
place where there was little piety or practice of religion, and where all
enormities reigned in the highest degree.

240 THE RENAISSANCE. BOOK n.

as they called it then. It was not yet stern and con-
strained. It expanded widely, freely, and rejoiced to
find itself so expanded. No longer at court only was
the drama found, but in the village. Strolling com-
panies betook themselves thither, and the country folk
supplied any deficiencies, when necessary. Shakspeare
saw, before he depicted them, stupid fellows, carpenters,
joiners, bellows-menders, play Pyramus and Thisbe, re-
present the lion roaring as gently as any sucking dove,
and the wall, by stretching out their hands. Every holi-
day was a pageant, in which townspeople, workmen, and
children bore their parts. They were actors by nature.
When the soul is full and fresh, it does not express its
ideas by reasonings ; it plays and figures them ; it
mimics them ; that is the true and original language,
the children's tongue, the speech of artists, of invention,
and of joy. It is in this manner they please them-
selves with songs and feasting, on all the symbolic holi-
days with which tradition has filled the year.1 On the
Sunday after Twelfth-night the labourers parade the
streets, with their shirts over their coats, decked with
ribbons, dragging a plough to the sound of music, and
dancing a sword-dance ; on another day they draw in
a cart a figure made of ears of corn, with songs, flutes,
and drums ; on another, Father Christmas and his com-
pany; or else they enact the history of Eobin Hood,
the bold archer, around the May-pole, or the legend of
Saint George and the Dragon. We might occupy half
a volume in describing all these holidays, such as
Harvest Home, All Saints, Martinmas, Sheepshearing,
above all Christmas, which lasted twelve days, and
sometimes six weeks. They eat and drink, junket,

1 .Nallmi) Drake, SJiaksj^eare and his Times, chap. v. and vi.

CHAP. i. THE PAGAN RENAISSANCE. 241

tumble about, kiss the girls, ring the bells, satiate
themselves with noise : coarse drunken revels, in which
man is an unbridled animal, and which are the incarna-
tion of natural life. The Puritans made no mistake
about that. Stubbes says :

" First, all the wilde heades of the parishe, conventying
together, chuse them a ground capitaine of mischeef, whan they
innoble with the title of my Lorde of Misserule, and hym they
crown with great solemnitie, and adopt for their kyng. This kyng
anoynted, chuseth for the twentie, fourtie, three score, or a hundred
iustie guttes like to hymself towaite uppon his lordelyrnaiestie. . .
Then have they their hobbie horses, dragons, and other antiques,
together with their baudie pipers and thunderyng drommers, to
strike up the devilles daunce withall : then marche these heathen
companie towardes the churche and churche-yarde, their pipers
pipyng, their drommers thonderyng, then- stumppes dauncyng,
their belles rynglyng, their handkerchefes swyngyng about their
heades like madmen, their hobbie horses and other monsters
skirmishyng amongest the throng ; and in this sorte they goe to
the churche (though the minister bee at praier or preachyng),
dauncyng, and swingyng their handkercheefes over their heades,
in the churche, like devilles incarnate, with such a confused noise,
that no man can heare his owne voice. Then the foolishe people
they looke, they stare, they laugh, they fleere, and mount upon
formes and pewes, to see these goodly pageauntes, solemnized in
this sort. Then after this, aboute the churche they goe againe
and againe, and so forthe into the churche-yarde, where they have
commonly their sommer haules, their bowers, arbours, and
banquettyng houses set up, wherein they feaste, banquet, and
daunce all that daie, and peradventure all that night too. And
thus these terrestriall furies spend the Sabbaoth claie ! ... An
other sorte of fantasticall fooles bringe to these helhoundes (the
Lorde of Misrule and his complices) some bread, some good ale,
some newe cheese, some olde cheese, some custardes, some cakes,
some flaunes, some tartes, some creame, some meate, some one
thing, some an other."

242 THE RENAISSANCE. BOOK 11,

He continues thus :

"Against Male, every parishe, towne and village assemble
themselves together, bothe men, women, and children, olde and
yong, even all indifferently ; they goe to the woodes where they
spende all the night in pleasant pastymes, and in the mornyng
they returne, bringing with them birch, bowes, and branches of
trees, to deck their assemblies withall. But their cheefest iewell
they bringe from thence is their Maie poole, whiche they bring
home with great veneration, as thus : They have twenty or four-
tie yoke of oxen, every ox havyng a sweete nosegaie of flowers
tyed on the tippe of his homes, and these oxen, drawe home this
Maie poole (this stinckyng idoll rather) . . . and thus beyng
reared up, they strawe the grounde aboute, binde greene boughes
about it, sett up sommer haules, bowers, and arbours hard by it ;
and then fall they to banquet and feast, to leape and daunce
aboute it, as the heathen people did at the dedication of their
idolles. . . . Of a hundred maides goyng to the woode over night,
there have scarcely the third parte returned home againe
undefiled." l

" On Shrove Tuesday/' says another,2 " at the sound
of a bell, the folk become insane, thousands at a time,
and forget all decency and common sense. ... It is to
Satan and the devil that they pay homage and do sacri-
fice to in these abominable pleasures." It is in fact to
nature, to the ancient Pan, to Freya, to Hertha, her
sisters, to the old Teutonic deities who survived the
middle-age. At this period, in the temporary decay of
Christianity, and the sudden advance of corporal well-
being, man adored himself, and there endured no life
within him but that of paganism.

1 Stubbes, Anatomie of Abuses, p. 168 et passim.
* Hentzner's Travels in England (Bentley's translation). He thought
that the figure carried about in the Harvest Home represented Ceres.

CHAP. i. THE PAGAN RENAISSANCE. 243

IV.

To sum up, observe the process of ideas at this time.
A few sectarians, chiefly in the towns and of the people,
clung gloomily to the Bible. But the court and the
men of the world sought their teachers and their heroes
from pagan Greece and Koine. About 14901 they
began to read the classics ; one after the other they trans-
lated them ; it was soon the fashion to read them in the
original. Queen Elizabeth, Jane Grey, the Duchess of
Norfolk, the Countess of Arundel, and many other ladies,
were conversant with Plato, Xenophon, and Cicero in
the original, and appreciated them. Gradually, by an
insensible change, men were raised to the level of the
great and healthy minds who had freely handled ideas
of all kinds fifteen centuries before. They comprehended
not only their language, but their thought ; they did
not repeat lessons from, but held conversations with
them; they were their equals, and found in them
intellects as manly as their own. For they were not
scholastic cavillers, miserable compilers, repulsive ped-
ants, like the professors of jargon whom the Tnidrnp.-a.gp.
had set over them, like gloomy Duns Scotus, whose
leaves Henry VIII.'s Visitors scattered to the winds.
They were gentlemen, statesmen, the most polished and
best educated men in the world, who knew how to
speak, and drew their ideas not from books, but from
things, living ideas, and which entered of themselves
into living souls. Across the train of hooded school-
men and sordid cavillers the two adult and thinking
ages were united, and the moderns, silencing the infan-

1 Warton, vol. ii. sect. 35. Before 1600 all the great poets were
translated into English, and between 1550 and 1616 all the great his-
torians of Greece and Rome. Lyly in 1 500 first taught Greek in public.

244 THE RENAISSANCE. BOOK n.

tine or snuffling voices of the middle-age, condescended
only to converse with the noble ancients. They
accepted their gods, at least they understand them,
and keep them by their side. In poems, festivals, on
hangings, almost in all ceremonies, they appear, not
restored by pedantry merely, but kept alive by sympathy,
and endowed by the arts with a life as nourishing and
almost as profound as that of their earliest birth.
After the terrible night of the middle-age, and the
dolorous legends of spirits and the damned, it was a
delight to see again Olympus shining upon us from
Greece; its heroic and beautiful deities once more
ravishing the heart of men ; they raised and instructed
this young world by speaking to it the language of
passion and genius ; and this age of strong deeds, free
sensuality, bold invention, had only to follow its own
bent, in order to discover in them its masters and the
eternal promoters of liberty and beauty.

Nearer still was another paganism, that of Italy ;
the more seductive because more modern, and because
it circulates fresh sap in an ancient stock ; the more
attractive, because more sensuous and present, with its
worship of force and genius, of pleasure and voluptu-
ousness. The rigorists knew this well, and were shocked
at it. Ascham writes :

" These bee the inchantementes of Circes, brought out of Italic
to marre mens maners in England ; much, by example of ill life,
but more by preceptes of fonde bookes, of late translated out of
Italian into English, sold in every shop in London. . . . There
bee moe of these ungratious bookes set out in Printe wythin
these fewe monethes, than have bene seue in England many
score yeares before. . . . Than they have in more reverence the
triumphes o£ Petrarche : than the Genesis of Moses : They

CHAP. i. THE PAGAN RENAISSANCE. 245

make more account of Tullies offices, than S. Paules epistles ;
of a tale in Bocace than a storie of the Bible."1

In fact, at that time Italy clearly led in everything,
and civilisation was to be drawn thence, as from its
spring. What is this civilisation which is thus imposed
on the whole of Europe, whence every science and
every elegance comes, whose laws are obeyed in every
court, in which Surrey, Sidney, Spenser, Shakspeare
sought their models and their materials ? It was pagan
in its elements and its birth ; in its language, which is
but Latin, hardly changed; in its Latin traditions and
recollections, which no gap has interrupted; in its
constitution, whose old municipal life first led and
absorbed the feudal life ; in the genius of its race, in
which energy and joy always abounded. More than
a century before other nations, — from the time of
Petrarch, Eienzi, Boccaccio, — the Italians began to recover
the lost antiquity, to set free the manuscripts buried in
the dungeons of France and Germany, to restore, inter-
pret, comment upon, study the ancients, to make them-
selves Latin in heart and mind, to compose in prose
and verse with the polish of Cicero and Virgil, to hold
sprightly converse and intellectual pleasures as the
ornament and the fairest flower of life.2 They adopt not
merely the externals of the life of the ancients, but its
very essence, that is, preoccupation with the present life,
forgetfulness of the future, the appeal to the senses, the

1 Ascham, The Scholemaster (1570), ed. Arber, 1870, first book, 78
et passim.

2 Ma il vero e principal ornemeuto dell' aniino in ciascuno penso io
che siano le lettere, benche i Franchesi solamente conoscano la nobilitk
dell'arme . . . et tutti i litterati tengon per vilissimi huomiuL Cas-
Ciglione, il Cortegiano, ed. 1535, p. 112.

246 THE RENAISSANCE. BOOK n.

renunciation of Christianity. " We must enjoy/' sang
their first poet, Lorenzo de Medici, in his pastorals and
triumphal songs : " there is no certainty of to-morrow."
In Pulci the mocking incredulity breaks out, the bold
and sensual gaiety, all the audacity of the free-thinkers,
who kicked aside in disgust the worn-out monkish frock
of the middle age. It was he who, in a jesting poem,
puts at the beginning of each canto a Hosanna, an In
principio, or a sacred text from the mass-book.1 When
he had been inquiring what the soul was, and how it
entered the body, he compared it to jam covered up in
white bread quite hot. What would become of it in
the other world ? " Some people think they will there
discover becafico's, plucked ortolans, excellent wine,
good beds, and therefore they follow the monks, walking
behind them. As for us, dear friend, we shall go into
the black valley, where we shall hear no more Alleluias."
If you wish for a more serious thinker, listen to the
great patriot, the Thucydides of the age, Machiavelli,
who, contrasting Christianity and paganism, says that
the first places " supreme happiness in humility, abjec-
tion, contempt for human things, while the other makes
the sovereign good consist in greatness of soul, force of
body, and all the qualities which make men to be feared."
Whereon he boldly concludes that Christianity teaches
man "to support evils, and not to do great deeds;" he
discovers in that inner weakness the cause of all oppres-
sions ; declares that " the wicked saw that they could
tyrannise without fear over men, who, in order to get to
paradise, were more disposed to suffer than to avenge
injuries." Through such sayings, in spite of his con-

1 See Burchard (the Pope's Steward), account of the festival at which
Lucretia Borgia was present. Letters of Aretimis. Life of Cellini, etc.

CHAP. i. THE PAGAN RENAISSANCE. 247

strained genuflexions, we can see which religion he
prefers. The ideal to which all efforts were turning, on
which all thoughts depended, and which completely
raised this civilisation, was the strong and happy man,
possessing all the powers to accomplish his wishes, and
disposed to use them in pursuit of his happiness.

If you would see this idea in its grandest operation,
you must seek it in the arts, such as Italy made them
and carried throughout Europe, raising or transforming
the national schools with such originality and vigour,
that all art likely to survive is derived from hence,
and the population of living figures with which they
have covered our walls, denotes, like Gothic architecture
or French tragedy, a unique epoch of human intelli-
gence. The attenuated mediaeval Christ — a miserable,
distorted, and bleeding earth-worm ; the pale and ugly
Virgin — a poor old peasant woman, fainting beside the
cross of her Son ; ghastly martyrs, dried up with fasts,
with entranced eyes ; knotty-fingered saints with sunken
chests, — all the touching or lamentable visions of the
middle-age have vanished : the train of godheads which
are now developed show nothing but flourishing frames,
noble, regular features, and fine easy gestures; the
names, the names only, are Christian. The new Jesus
is a " crucified Jupiter," as Pulci called him ; the
Virgins which Raphael sketched naked, before covering
them with garments,1 are beautiful girls, quite earthly,
related to the Fornarina. The saints which Michel
Angelo arranges and contorts in heaven in his picture
of the Last Judgment are an assembly of athletes,
capable of fighting well and daring much. A martyr-

1 See Ha sketches at Oxford, and those of Fra Bartolomeo at Flor-
ence. See also the Martyrdom of St. Laurence, by Baccio Bandinelli.

248 THE RENAISSANCE. BOOK n.

dorn, like that of Saint Laurence, is a fine ceremony in
which a beautiful young man, without clothing, lies
amidst fifty men dressed and grouped as in an ancient
gymnasium. Is there one of them who had macerated
himself? Is there one who had thought with anguish
and tears of the judgment of God, who had worn down
and subdued his flesh, who had filled his heart with
the sadness and sweetness of the gospel? They are
too vigorous for that, they are in too robust health ;
their clothes fit them too well ; they are too ready for
prompt and energetic action. We might make of them
strong soldiers or superb courtesans, admirable in a
pageant or at a ball. So, all that the spectator accords
to their halo of glory, is a bow or a sign of the cross ;
after which his eyes find pleasure in them ; they are
there simply for the enjoyment of the eyes. What
the spectator feels at the sight of a Florentine Madonna,
is the splendid creature, whose powerful body and fine
growth bespeak her race and her vigour ; the artist did
not paint moral expression as nowadays, the depth of a
soul tortured and refined by three centuries of culture.
They confine themselves to the body, to the extent even
of speaking enthusiastically of the spinal column itself,
" which is magnificent ; " of the shoulder-blades, which
in the movements of the arm "produce an admirable
effect." " You will next draw the bone which is situ-
ated between the hips. It is very fine, and is called
the sacrum."1 The important point with them is to
represent the nude well. Beauty with them is that of
the complete skeleton, sinews which are linked together
and tightened, the thighs which support the trunk, the
strong chest breathing freely, the pliant neck. What

1 Benvenuto Cellini, Principles of the Art of Design.

CHAP. i. THE PAGAN RENAISSANCE. 249

a pleasure to be naked ! How good it is in the full
light to rejoice in a strong body, well-formed muscles,
a spirited and bold soul ! The splendid goddesses
reappear in their primitive nudity, not dreaming that
they are nude ; you see from the tranquillity of their
look, the simplicity of their expression, that they have
always been thus, and that shame has not yet reached
them. The soul's life is not here contrasted, as amongst
us, with the body's life ; the one is not so lowered and
degraded, that we dare not show its actions and func-
tions ; they do not hide them ; man does not dream of
being all spirit. They rise, as of old, from the luminous
sea, with their rearing steeds tossing up their manes,
champing the bit, inhaling the briny savour, whilst their
companions wind the sounding-shell; and the specta-
tors,1 accustomed to handle the sword, to combat naked
with the dagger or double-handled blade, to ride on
perilous roads, sympathise with the proud shape of the
bended back, the effort of the arm about to strike, the
long quiver of the muscles which, from neck to heel,
swell out, to brace a man,. or to throw him.

1 Life of Cellini. Compare also these exercises \vhich Castiglione
prescribes for a well-educated man, in his Cortegia.no, ed. 1585, p. 55:—
" Per6 voglio che il nostro cortegiano sia perfetto cavaliere d'ogni sella,
. . . Et perche degli Italiani e peculiar laude il cavalcare bene alia brida,
il maneggiar con raggione massimamente cavalli aspri, il corre lance, il
giostare, sia in questo de meglior Italiani. . . . Nel torneare, tener un
passo, combattere una sbarra, sia buono tra il miglior francesi. . . . Ne!
giocare a canne, correr torri, lanciar haste e dardi, sia tra Spagnuoli eccel-
lente .... Couveniente e ancor sapere saltare, e correre ; . . . . aucor
uobile exercitio il gioco di palla. . . . Non di minor laude estiino il volte
giar a cavallo.'

250 THE KENAISSANCE. BOOK n.

§ 2. POETKY.
I.

Transplanted into different races and climates, this
paganism receives from each, distinct features and a
distinct character. In England it becomes English;
the English Eenaissance is the Eenaissance of the *
Saxon genius. Invention recommences ; and to invent
is to express one's genius. A Latin race can only
invent by expressing Latin ideas ; a Saxon race by ex-
pressing Saxon ideas; and we shall find in the new
civilisation and poetry, descendants of Csedmon and
Adhelm, of Piers Plowman, and Robin Hood.

II.

Old Puttenham says :

" In the latter end of the same king (Henry the eighth) reigne,
sprong up a new company of courtly makers, of whom Sir
Thomas Wyat th' elder and Henry Earle of Surrey were the two
chieftaines, who having travailed into Italic, and there tasted
the sweete and stately measures and stile of the Italian Poesie,
as novices newly crept out of the schooles of Dante, Arioste, and
Petrarch, they greatly pollished our rude and homely maner of
vulgar Poesie, from that it had bene before, and for that cause
may justly be sayd the first reformers of our English meetre •
and stile."1

Not that their style was very original, or openly exhibits
the new spirit: the middle-age is nearly ended, but
not quite. By their side Andrew Borde, John Bale,
John Heywood, Skelton himself, repeat the plati-
tudes of the old poetry and the coarseness of the old
style. Their manners, hardly refined, were still half

1 Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, ed. Arber, 1869, book i. oh.
51, p. 74.

CHAP. i. THE PAGAtf KENAISSANCE. 251

feudal; on the field, before Landrecies, the English
commander wrote a friendly letter to the French gover-
nor of Te'rouanne, to ask him "if he had not some
gentlemen disposed to break a lance in honour of the
ladies/' and promised to send six champions to meet
them. Parades, combats, wounds, challenges, love,
appeals to the judgment of God, penances, — all these
are found -in the life of Surrey as in a chivalric romance.
A great lord, an earl, a relative of the king, who had
figured in processions and ceremonies, had made war,
commanded fortresses, ravaged countries, mounted to the
assault, fallen in the breach, had been saved by his
servant, magnificent, sumptuous, irritable, ambitious,
four times imprisoned, finally beheaded. At the corona-
tion of Anne Boleyn he wore the fourth sword ; at the
marriage of Anne of Cleves he was one of the challengers
at the jousts. Denounced and placed in durance, he
offered to fight in his shirt against an armed adversary.
Another time he was put in prison for having eaten flesh
in Lent. No wonder if this prolongation of chivalric
manners brought with it a prolongation of chivalric
poetry; if in an age which had known Petrarch, poets
displayed the sentiments of Petrarch. Lord Berners,
Sackville, Sir Thomas Wyatt, and Surrey in the first
rank, were like Petrarch, plaintive and platonic lovers.
It was pure love to which Surrey gave expression ; for his
lady, the beautiful Geraldine, like Beatrice and Laura,
was an ideal personage, and a child of thirteen years.

And yet, amid this languor of mystical tradition, a
personal feeling had sway. In this spirit which imi-
tated, and that badly at times, which still groped for an
outlet and now and then admitted into its polished
I stanzas the old, simple expressions and stale metaphors of

252 THE RENAISSANCE. BOOK n.

heralds of arms and trouveres, there was already visible
the Northern melancholy, the inner and gloomy emotion.
This feature, which presently, at the finest moment of
its richest blossom, in the splendid expansiveness of
natural life, spreads a sombre tint over the poetry of
Sidney, Spenser, Shakspeare, already in the first poet
separates this pagan yet Teutonic world from the other,
wholly voluptuous, which in Italy, with lively and
refined irony, had no taste, except for art and pleasure.
Surrey translated the Ecclesiastes into verse. Is it not
singular, at this early hour, in this rising dawn, to find
such a book in his hand? A disenchantment, a sad or
bitter dreaminess, an innate consciousness of the vanity
of human things, are never lacking in this country and
in this race ; the inhabitants support life with difficulty,
and know how to speak of death. Surrey's finest verses
bear witness thus soon to his serious bent, this instinc-
tive and grave philosophy. He records his griefs,
regretting his beloved Wyatt, his friend Clere, his com-
panion the young Duke of Eichniond, all dead in their
prime. Alone, a prisoner at Windsor, he recalls the
happy days they have passed together :

" So cruel prison how could betide, alas,

As proud Windsor, where I in lust and joy,
With a Kinges son, my childish years did pass,
In greater feast than Priam's son of Troy.

Where each sweet place returns a taste full sour,
The large green courts, where we were wont to hove,

With eyes cast up into the Maiden's tower,
And easy sighs, such as folk draw in love.

The stately seats, the ladies bright of hue.
The dances short, long tales of great delight,

CHAP. T. THE PAGAN RENAISSANCE. 253

With words and looks, that tigers could but rue ;
Where each of us did plead the other's right.

The palme-play, where, despoiled for the game,
With dazed eyes oft we by gleams of love

Have miss'd the ball, and got sight of our dame,
To bait her eyes, which kept the leads above. . . .

The secret thoughts, imparted with such trust ;

The wanton talk, the divers change of play ;
The friendship sworn, each promise kept so just,

Wherewith we past the winter night away.

And with his thought the blood forsakes the face ;

The tears berain my cheeks of deadly hue :
The which, as soon as sobbing sighs, alas !

Up-supped have, thus I my plaint renew :

0 place of bliss ! renewer of my woes !

Give me account, where is my noble fere 1
Whom in thy walls thou dost each night enclose ;

To other lief; but unto me most dear.

Echo, alas ! that doth my sorrow rue,

Returns thereto a hollow sound of plaint."1

So in love, it is the sinking of a weary soul, to which
he gives vent :

" For all things having life, sometime hath quiet rest ;
The bearing ass, the drawing ox, and every other beast ;
The peasant, and the post, that serves at all assays ;
The ship-boy, and the galley-slave, have time to take their ease -,
Save T, alas ! whom care of force doth so constrain,
To wail the day, and wake the night, continually in pain,
From pensiveness to plaint, from plaint to bitter tears,
From tears to painful plaint again ; and thus my life it wears.''

1 Surrey's Poems, Pickering, 1831, p. 17.

2 Ibid. "The faithful lover declareth his pains and his uncertain
joySj and with only hope recomforteth his woful heart," p. 53.

254 THE RENAISSANCE. BOOK n.

That which brings joy to others brings him grief :

" The soote season, that bud and bloom forth brings,
With green hath clad the hill, and eke the vale.
The nightingale with feathers new she sings ;
The turtle to her mate hath told her tale.
Summer is come, for every spray now springs ;
The hart has hung his old head on the pale ;
The buck in brake his winter coat he flings ;
The fishes flete with new repaired scale ;
The adder all her slough away she slings;
The swift swallow pursueth the flies smale ;
The busy bee her honey now she mings ;
Winter is worn that was the flowers' bale.
And thus I see among these pleasant things
Each care decays, and yet my sorrow springs ! " l

For all that, he will love on to his last sigh.

" Yea, rather die a thousand times, than once to false my faith
And if my feeble corpse, through weight of \roful smart
Do fail, or faint, my will it is that still she keep my heart.
And when this carcass here to earth shall oe refar'd,
I do bequeath my wearied ghost to serve her afterward." 2

An infinite love, and pure as Petrarch's ; and she is
worthy of it. In the midst of all these studied or
imitated verses, an admirable portrait stands out, the
simplest and truest we can imagine, a work of the
heart now, and not of the memory, which behind the
Madonna of chivalry shows the English wife, and be-
yond feudal gallantry domestic bliss. Surrey alone,
restless, hears within him the firm tones of a good
friend, a sincere counsellor, Hope, who speaks to him
thus :

1 Surrey's Poems. " Description of Spring, wherein every thing
renews, save only the lover," p. 3. 3 Ibid. p. 56.

CHAP. i. THE PAGAN KENAISSANCE. 255

" For I assure thee, even by oath,
And thereon take my hand and troth,
That she is one the worthiest,
The truest, and the faithfullest ;
The gentlest and the meekest of mind
That here on earth a man may find :
And if that love and truth were gone,
In her it might be found alone.
For in her mind no thought there is,
But how she may oe true, I wis ;
And tenders thee and all thy heale,
And wishes both thy health and weal ;
And loves thee even as far forth than
As any woman may a man ;
And is thine own, and so she says ;
And cares for thee ten thousand ways.
Of thee she speaks, on thee she thinks ;
With thee she eats, with thee she drinks ;
With thee she talks, with thee she moans ;
With thee she sighs, with thee she groans ;
With thee she says ' Farewell mine own ! '
When thou, God knows, full far art gone.
And even, to tell thee all aright,
To thee she says full oft ' Good night ! '
And names thee oft her own most dear,
Her comfort, weal, and all her cheer ;
And tells her pillow all the tale
How thou hast done her woe and bale ;
And how she longs, and plains for thee.
And says, ' Why art thou so from me ? '
Am I not she that loves thee best !
Do I not wish thine ease and rest ?
Seek I not how I may thee please ]
Why art thou then so from thine ease ?
If I be she for whom thou carest,
For whom in torments so thou farest,

256 THE RENAISSANCE. BOOK u

Alas ! thou knowest to find me here,
Where I remain thine own most dear.
Thine own most true, thine own most just,
Thine own that loves thee still, and must ;
Thine own that cares alone for thee,
As thou, I think, dost care for me ;
And even the woman, she alone,
That is fuU bent to be thine own." l

Certainly it is of his wife 2 that he is thinking here,
not of an imaginary Laura. The poetic dream ot
Petrarch has become the exact picture of deep and per-
fect conjugal affection, such as yet survives in England ;
such as all the poets, from the authoress of the Nut-
lyrown Maid to Dickens,3 have never failed to represent.

III.

An English Petrarch : no juster title could be given
to Surrey, for it expresses his talent as well as his dis-
position. In fact, like Petrarch, the oldest of the
humanists, and the earliest exact writer of the modern
tongue, Surrey introduces a new style, the manly style,
which marks a great change of the mind ; for this new
form of writing is the result of superior reflection,
which, governing the primitive impulse, calculates and
selects with an end in view. At last the intellect has
grown capable of self-criticism, and actually criticises
itself. It corrects its unconsidered works, infantine
and incoherent, at once incomplete and superabundant ;

1 Surrey's 'Poems. "A description of the restless state of the
lover when absent from the mistress of his heart, " p. 78.

2 In another piece, Complaint on the Absence of her Lover being upon
the Sea, lie speaks in direct terms of his wife, almost as affectionately.

a Greene, Beaumont and Fletcher, Webster, Shakspeare, Ford,
Otway, Richardson, De Foe, Fielding, Dickens, Thackeray, etc-

CHAP. i. THE PAGAN RENAISSANCE. 257

it strengthens and binds them together ; it prunes and
perfects them ; it takes from them the master idea, to
set it free and to show it clearly. This is what Surrey
does, and his education had prepared him for it; for
he had studied Virgil as well as Petrarch, and trans-
lated two books of the ^Eneid, almost verse for verse.
In such company a man cannot but select his ideas and
connect his phrases. After their example, Surrey gauges
the means of striking the attention, assisting the intel-
ligence, avoiding fatigue and weariness. He looks
forward to the last line whilst writing the first. He
keeps the strongest word for the last, and shows the
symmetry of ideas by the symmetry of phrases. Some-
times he guides the intelligence by a continuous series
of contrasts to the final image ; a kind of sparkling
casket, in which he means to deposit the idea which he
carries, and to which he directs our attention from the
first.1 Sometimes he leads his reader to the close of a
long flowery description, and then suddenly checks
him with a sorrowful phrase.2 He arranges his pro-
cess, and knows how to produce effects ; he uses even
classical expressions, in which two substantives, each
supported by its adjective, are balanced on either side
of the verb.3 He collects his phrases in harmonious
periods, and does not neglect the delight of the ears
any more than of the mind. By his inversions he adds
force to his ideas, and weight to his argument. He
selects elegant or noble terms, rejects idle words and
redundant phrases. Every epithet contains an idea,
every metaphor a sentiment. There is eloquence in

1 The Frailty and Hwrtfulness of Beauty.
2 Description of Spring. A Vow to love faithfully.

3 Complaint of the Lover disdained.
VOL. L fc>

258 THE RENAISSANCE. BOOK 11.

the regular development of his thought ; music in the
sustained accent of his verse.

Such is the new-born art. Those who have ideas,
now possess an instrument capable of expressing them.
Like the Italian painters, who in fifty years had intro-
duced or discovered all the technical tricks of the
brush, English writers, in half-a-century, introduce or dis-
cover all the artifices of language, period, elevated style,
heroic verse, soon the grand stanza, so effectually, that
a little later the most perf ect versifiers, Dry den, and Pope
himself, says Dr. ISTott, will add scarce anything to the
rules, invented or applied, which were employed in the
earliest efforts.1 Even Surrey is too near to these
authors, too constrained in his models, not sufficiently
free ; he has not yet felt the fiery blast of the age ; we
do not find in him a bold genius, an impassioned
writer capable of wide expansion, but a courtier, a
lover of elegance, who, penetrated by the beauties of
two finished literatures, imitates Horace and the chosen
masters of Italy, corrects and polishes little morsels,
aims at speaking perfectly fine language. Amongst
semi-barbarians he wears a full dress becomingly. Yet
he does not wear it completely at his ease : he keeps
his eyes too exclusively on his models, and does not
venture on frank and free gestures. He is sometimes
as a school-boy, makes too great use of 'hot' and
' cold,' wounds and martyrdom. Although a lover,
and a genuine one, he thinks too much that he must
be so in Petrarch's manner, that his phrase must be
balanced and his image kept up. I had almost said
that, in Ms sonnets of disappointed love, he thinks less
often of the strength of love than of the beauty of his

1 Surrey, ed. Nott.

CHAP. i. THE PAGAN RENAISSANCE. 259

writing. He has conceits, ill-chosen words ; he uses trite
expressions ; he relates how Nature, having formed his
lady,, broke the mould ; he assigns parts to Cupid and
Venus ; he employs the old machinery of the troubadours
and the ancients, like a clever man who wishes to pass for
a gallant. At first scarce any mind dares be quite itself :
when a new art arises, the first artist listens not to Ms
heart, but to his masters, and asks himself at every step
whether he be setting foot on solid ground, or whether
he is not stumbling.

IV.

Insensibly the growth became complete, and at the
end of the century all was changed. A new, strange,
overloaded style had been formed, destined to remain
in force until the Kestoration, not only in poetry,
but also in prose, even in ceremonial speech and
theological discourse,1 so suitable to the spirit of the
age, that we meet with it at the same time throughout
the whole of Europe, in Eonsard and d'Aubigne", in
Calderon, Gongora, and Marini. In 1580' appeared
Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit, by Lyly, which was its
text-book, its masterpiece, its caricature, and was re-
ceived with universal admiration.2 " Our nation," says
Edward Blount, " are in his debt for a new English which
hee taught them. All our ladies were then his scollers ;
and that beautie in court who could not parley
Euphuesme was as little regarded as shee which now
there speakes not French." The ladies knew the phrases

1 The Speaker's address to Charles II. on his restoration. Compare
it with the speech of M. de Fontanes under the Empire. In each case
it was the close of a literary epocn. Read for illustration the speech
before the University of Oxford, Athena Oxonienses, i. 193.

3 His second work, Euphues and his England, appeared in 1581.

260 THE RENAISSANCE. BOOK n.

of Euphues by heart : strange, studied, and refined phrases,
enigmatical ; whose author seems of set purpose to seek
the least natural expressions and the most far-fetched,
full of exaggeration and antithesis, in which mytholo-
gical allusions, reminiscences from alchemy, botanical
and astronomical metaphors, all the rubbish and medley
of learning, travels, mannerism, roll in a flood of conceits
and comparisons. Do not judge it by the grotesque
picture that Walter Scott drew of it. Sir Piercie
Shafton is but a pedant, a cold and dull copyist ; it is
its warmth and originality which give this style a true
force and an accent of its own. You must conceive it,
not as dead and inert, such as we have it to-day in old
books, but springing from the lips of ladies and young
lords in pearl-bedecked doublet, quickened by their
vibrating voices, their laiighter, the flash of their eyes,
the motion of their hands as they played with the hilt
of their swords or with their satin cloaks. They were
full of life, their heads filled to overflowing; and they
amused themselves, as our sensitive and eager artists do,
at their ease in the studio. They did not speak to con-
vince or be understood, but to satisfy their excited
imagination, to expend their overflowing wit.1 They
played with words, twisted, put them out of shape,
enjoyed sudden views, strong contrasts, which they pro-
duced one after another, ever and anon, and in great
quantities. They cast flower on flower, tinsel on tinsel :
everything sparkling delighted them ; they gilded and
embroidered and plumed their language like their gar-
ments. They cared nothing for clearness, order, common
sense; it was a festival and a madness; absurdity
pleased them. They knew nothing more tempting than

1 Bee Shakspeare's young metu Mereutio especially.

CHAP. i. THE PAGAN RENAISSANCE. 261

a carnival of splendours and oddities ; all was huddled
together : a coarse gaiety, a tender and sad word, a
pastoral^ a sounding nourish of unmeasured boasting, a
gambol of a Jack-pudding. Eyes, ears, all the senses,
eager and excited, are satisfied by this jingle of syllables,
the display of fine high-coloured words, the unexpected
clash of droll or familiar images, the majestic roll of
well-poised periods. Every one had his own oaths, his
elegances, his style. " One would say," remarks Heylyn,
" that they are ashamed of their mother-tongue, and do
not find it sufficiently varied to express the whims of
their mind." We no longer imagine this inventiveness,
* this boldness of fancy, this ceaseless fertility of nervous
sensibility : there was no genuine prose at that time ;
the poetic flood swallowed it up. A word was not an
exact symbol, as with us; a document which from
cabinet to cabinet carried a precise thought. It was
part of a complete action, a little drama; when they
read it, they did not take it by itself, but imagined it
with the intonation of a hissing and shrill voice, with
the puckering of the lips, the knitting of the brows,
and the succession of pictures which crowd behind it,
and which it calls forth in a flash of lightning.
Each one mimics and pronounces it in his own
style, and impresses his own soul upon it. It
was a song, which, like the poet's verse, contains a
thousand things besides the literal sense, and manifests
the depth, warmth, and sparkling of the source whence
it flowed. For in that time, even when the man was
feeble, his work lived ; there is some pulse in the least
productions of this age ; force and creative fire signalise
it; they penetrate through bombast and affectation.
Lyly himself, so fantastic that he seems to write pur-
posely in defiance of common sense, is at. times a

262 THE RENAISSANCE. BOOK n

genuine poet ; a singer, a man capable of rapture, akin
to Spenser and Shakspeare ; one of those introspective
dreamers, who see dancing fairies, the purpled cheeks
of goddesses, drunken, amorous woods, as he says :

" Adorned with the presence of my love,
The woods I fear such secret power shall prove,
As they'll shut up each path, hide every way,
Because they still would have her go astray." 1

The reader must assist me, and assist himself. I can-
not otherwise give him to understand what the men
of this age had the felicity to experience.

Luxuriance and irregularity were the two features of
this spirit and this literature, — features common to all
the literatures of the Eenaissance, but more marked
here than elsewhere, because the German race is not
confined, like the Latin, by the taste for harmonious
forms, and prefers strong impression to fine expression.
We must select amidst this crowd of poets ; and here
is one amongst the first, who exhibits, by his writ-
ings as well as by his life, the greatness and the folly
of the prevailing manners and the public taste : Sir
Philip Sidney, nephew of the Earl of Leicester, a great
lord and a man of action, accomplished in every kind
of culture ; who, after a good training in classical litera-
ture, travelled in France, Germany, and Italy ; read
Plato and Aristotle, studied astronomy and geometry at
Venice ; pondered over the Greek tragedies, the Italian
sonnets, the pastorals of Montemayor, the poems of
Ronsard ; displaying an interest in science, keeping up
an exchange of letters with the learned Hubert Languet ;
and withal a man of the world, a favourite of Elizabeth,
having had enacted in her honour a flattering and comic
pastoral ; a genuine " jewel of the court ;" a judge, like

1 TJie Maid far Metainorphosis.

SIR PHILIP SIDNEY.

CHAP. i. THE PAGAN RENAISSANCE. 263

d'TIrfe*, of lofty gallantry and fine language ; above all,
chivalrous in heart and deed, who wished to follow mari-
time adventure with Drake, and, to crown all, fated
to die an early and heroic death. He was a cavalry
officer, and had saved the English army at Gravelines.
Shortly after, mortally wounded, and dying of thirst, as
some water was brought to him, he saw by his side a
soldier still more desperately hurt, who was looking at
the water with anguish in his face : " Give it to this
man," said he ; " his necessity is still greater than mine."
Do not forget the vehemence and impetuosity of the
middle-age ; — one hand ready for action, and kept in-
cessantly on the hilt of the sword or poniard. " Mr.
Molineux," wrote he to his father's secretary, "if ever
I know you to do so much as read any letter I write to
my father, without his commandment or my consent, I
will thrust my dagger into you. And trust to it, for I
speak it in earnest." It was the same man who said to
his uncle's adversaries that they " lied in their throat ;"
and to support his words, promised them a meeting in
three months in any place in Europe. The savage
energy of the preceding age remains intact, and it is for
this reason that poetry took so firm a hold on these
virgin souls. The human harvest is never so fine as
when cultivation opens up a new soil. Impassioned,
moreover, melancholy and solitary, he naturally turned
to noble and ardent fantasy ; and he was so much the
poet, that he had no need of verse.

Shall I describe his pastoral epic, the Arcadia ? It
is but a recreation, a sort of poetical romance, written
in the country for the amusement of his sister ; a work
of fashion, which, like Cyrus and Cldlie,1 is not a monu-

1 Two French novels of the age of Louis XIV., each in ten volumes,
and written by Mademoiselle de Scudery. — TR.

264 THE RENAISSANCE. BOOK n.

ment, but a document. This kind of books shows only
the externals, the current elegance and politeness, the
jargon of the fashionable world, — in short, that which
should be spoken before ladies ; and yet we perceive
from it the bent of the public opinion. In CUlie, oratori-
cal development, delicate and collected analysis, the flow-
ing converse of men seated quietly in elegant arm-chairs ;
in the Arcadia, fantastic imagination, excessive senti-
ment, a medley of events which suited men scarcely
recovered from barbarism. Indeed, in London they still
used to fire pistols at each other in the streets; and
under Henry VIII. and his children, Queens, a Protector,
the highest nobles, knelt under the axe of the execu-
tioner. Armed and perilous existence long resisted in
Europe the establishment of peaceful and quiet life.
It was necessary to change society and the soil, in order
to transform men of the sword into citizens. The high
roads of Louis XIY. and his regular administration, and
more recently the railroads and the sergents de wile, freed
the French from habits of violence and a taste for
dangerous adventure. Remember that at this period
men's heads were full of tragical images. Sidney's
Arcadia contains enough of them to supply half-a-dozen
epics. "It is a trifle," says the author; "my young
head must be delivered." In the first twenty-five pages
you meet with a shipwreck, an account of pirates, a
half-drowned prince rescued by shepherds, a journey in
Arcadia, various disguises, the retreat of a king with-
drawn into solitude with his wife and children, the de-
liverance of a young imprisoned lord, a war against the
Helots, the conclusion of peace, and many other things.
Read on, and you will find princesses shut up by a
wicked fairy, who beats them, and threatens them with

CHAP. i. THE PAGAN RENAISSANCE. 265

death if they refuse to many her son ; a beautiful queen
condemned to perish by fire if certain knights do not
come to her succour; a treacherous prince tortured for his
wicked deeds, then cast from the top of a pyramid ; fights,
surprises, abductions, travels : in short, the whole pro-
gramme of the most romantic tales. That is the serious
element : the agreeable is of a like nature ; the fantastic
predominates. - Improbable pastoral serves, as in Shaks-
peare or Lope de Vega, for an intermezzo to improbable
tragedy. You are always coming upon dancing shep-
herds. They are very courteous, good poets, and subtle
metaphysicians. Several of them are disguised princes
who pay their court to the princesses. They sing
continually, and get up allegorical dances; two bands
approach, servants of Eeason and Passion; their hats,
ribbons, and dress are described in full. They quarrel
in verse, and their retorts, which follow close on one
another, over-refined, keep up a tournament of wit.
Who cared for what was natural or possible in this age ?
There were such festivals at Elizabeth's 'progresses;'
and you have only to look at the engravings of Sadeler,
Martin de Vos, and Goltzius, to find this mixture of
sensitive beauties and philosophical enigmas. The
Countess of Pembroke and her ladies were delighted to
picture this profusion of costumes and verses, this play
beneath the trees. They had eyes in the sixteenth
century, senses which sought satisfaction in poetry — the
same satisfaction as in masquerading and painting.
Man was not yet a pure reasoner ; abstract truth was not
enough for him. Rich stuffs, twisted about and folded ;
the sun to shine upon them, a large meadow studded
with white daisies; ladies in brocaded dresses, with
bare arms, crowns on their heads, instruments of music

266 THE RENAISSANCE. BOOK n.

behind the trees, — this is what the reader expects ; he
cares nothing for contrasts;' he will readily accept a
drawing-room in the midst of the fields.

What are they going to say there ? Here comes out
that nervous exaltation, in all its folly, which is charac-
teristic of the spirit of the age ; love rises to the thirty-
sixth heaven. Musidorus is the brother of Celadon ;
Pamela is closely related to the severe heroines of
Astrde;1 all the Spanish exaggerations abound and all the
Spanish falsehoods. For in these works of fashion or of
the Court, primitive sentiment never retains its since-
rity : wit, the necessity to please, the desire for effect, of
speaking better than others, alter it, influence it, heap up
embellishments and refinements, so that nothing is left
but twaddle. Musidorus wished to give Pamela a kiss.
She repels him. He would have died on the spot ; but
luckily remembers that his mistress commanded him to
leave her, and finds himself still able to obey her
command. He complains to the trees, weeps in verse :
there are dialogues where Echo, repeating the last word,
replies ; duets in rhyme, balanced stanzas, in which the
theory of love is minutely detailed ; in short, all the
grand airs of ornamental poetry. If they send a letter
to their mistress, they speak to it, tell the ink :
" Therefore mourne boldly, my inke ; for while shee
lookes upon you, your blacknesse will shine : cry out
boldly my lamentation; for while shee reades you,
your cries will be musicke."2

Again, two young princesses are going to bed :
" They impoverished their clothes to enrich their bed,

1 Celadon, a rustic lover in Astrte, a French novel in five volumes,
named after the heroine, and written by d'Urfe (d. 1625).— Tn.

2 Arcadia, ed. fol. 1629, p. 117.

CHAP. i. THE PAGAN RENAISSANCE. 267

which for that night might well scorne the shrine of
Venus; and there cherishing one another with deare,
though chaste embracements ; with sweete, though cold
kisses ; it might seeme that love was come to play him
there without dart, or that wearie of his owne fires, he
was there to refresh himselfe between their sweete
breathing lippes."1

In excuse of these follies, remember that they have
their parallels in Shakspeare. Try rather to comprehend
them, to imagine them in their place, with their sur-
roundings, such as they are ; that is, as the excess of
singularity and inventive fire. Even though they mar
now and then the finest ideas, yet a natural freshness
pierces through the disguise. Take another example :
" In the time that the morning did strew roses and
violets in the heavenly floore against the coming of the
sun, the nightingales (striving one with the other which
could in most dainty varietie recount their wronge-
caused sorrow) made them put off their sleep."

In Sidney's second work, The Defence of Poesie, we
meet with genuine imagination, a sincere and serious
tone, a grand, commanding style, all the passion and
elevation which he carries in his heart and puts into his
verse. He is a muser, a Platonist, who is penetrated
by the doctrines of the ancients, who takes things from
a lofty point of view, who places the excellence of poetry
not in pleasing effect, imitation, or rhyme, but in that
creative and superior conception by which the artist
creates anew and embellishes nature. At the same time,
he is an ardent man, trusting in the nobleness of his
aspirations and in the width of his ideas, who puts down
the brawling of the shoppy, narrow, vulgar Puritanism,

1 Arcadia, ed. fol. 1629, book ii. p. 114.

268 THE RENAISSANCE. BOOK n

and glows with the lofty irony, the proud freedom, of a
poet and a lord.

In his eyes, if there is any art or science capable of
augmenting and cultivating our generosity, it is poetry.
He draws comparison after comparison between it and
philosophy or history, whose pretensions he laughs at
and dismisses.1 He fights for poetry as a knight for
his lady, and in what heroic and splendid style ! He
says : " I never heard the old Song of Percie and
Douglas, that I found not my heart moved more than
with a trumpet : and yet it is sung but by some blinde
Crowder, with no rougher voyce, than rude stile ; which
beeing so evill apparelled in the dust and Cobweb of that
uncivill age, what would it work, trimmed in the gorge-
ous eloquence of Pindare ? " 2

The philosopher repels, the poet attracts : " Nay hee
doth as if your journey should lye through a faire vine-
yard, at the very first, give you a cluster of grapes, that
full of that taste, you may long to passe further." 3

What description of poetry can displease you ? Not
pastoral so easy and genial ? " Is it the bitter but whole-
some lambicke, who rubbes the galled minde, making
shame the Trumpet of villanie, with bold and open cry-
ing out against naughtinesse ? " 4

At the close he reviews his arguments, and the
vibrating martial accent of his poetical period is like a
trump of victory : " So that since the excellencies of it
(poetry) may bee so easily and so justly confirmed, and

1 The Defence of Poesie, ed. fol. 1629, p. 558 : " I dare undertake,
that Orlando Furioso, or honest King Arthur, will never displease a
soldier : but the quidditie of Ens and prima materia, will hardly agree
with a Corselet." See also, in the same book, the very lively and spirited
personification of History and Philosophy, full of genuine talent.

a Ibid. p. 553. 3 jfai D 550 4 ftid. p. 552.

CHAP. i. THE PAGAN RENAISSANCE. 269

the low-creeping objections so soone trodden downe, it
not being an Art of lyes, but of true doctrine; not of
etfeminatenesse, but of notable stirring of courage ; not
of abusing man's wit, but of strengthning man's wit ; not
banished, but honoured by Plato ; let us rather plant
more Laurels for to ingarland the Poets heads than
suffer the ill-savoured breath of such wrong speakers,
once to blow upon the cleare springs of Poesie."1

From such vehemence and gravity you may anticipate
what his verses will be.

Often, after reading the poets of this age, I have
looked for some time at the contemporary prints, telling
myself that man, in mind and body, was not then such
as we see him to-day. We also have our passions, but
we are no longer strong enough to bear them. They
unsettle us ; we are no longer poets without suffering
for it. Alfred de Musset, Heine, Edgar Poe, Burns,
Byron, Shelley, Cowper, how many shall I instance?
Disgust, mental and bodily degradation, disease, impo-
tence, madness, suicide, at best a permanent hallucina-
tion or feverish raving, — these are nowadays the ordi-
nary issues of the poetic temperament. The passion
of the brain gnaws our vitals, dries lip the blood, eats
into the marrow, shakes us like a tempest, and the
human frame, such as civilisation has made us, is not
substantial enough long to resist it. They, who have
been more roughly trained, who are more inured to the
inclemencies of climate, more hardened by bodily exer-
cise, more firm against danger, endure and live. Is

1 The Defence of Poesie, p. 560. Here and there we find also verse
as spirited as this :

"Or Pindar's Apes, flaxint they in phrases fine.
Enam'ling with pied flowers their thoughts of gold." — P. 568.

270 THE RENAISSANCE. BOOK n.

there a man living who could withstand the storm of
passions and visions which swept over Shakspeare, and
end, like him, as a sensible citizen and landed proprietor
in his small county ? The muscles were firmer, despair
less prompt. The rage of concentrated attention, the
half hallucinations, the anguish and heaving of the breast,
the quivering of the limbs bracing themselves involun-
tarily and blindly for action, all the painful yearnings
which accompany grand desires, exhausted them less ;
this is why they desired longer, and dared more.
D'Aubigne, wounded with many sword-thrusts, conceiv-
ing death at hand, had himself bound on his horse that he
might see his mistress once more, and rode thus several
leagues, losing blood all the way, and arriving in a swoon.
Such feelings we glean still from their portraits, in the
straight looks which pierce like a sword ; in that strength
of back, bent or twisted; in the sensuality, energy,
enthusiasm, which breathe from their attitude or look.
Such feelings we still discover in their poetry, in Greene,
Lodge, Jonson, Spenser, Shakspeare, in Sidney, as in all
the rest. We quickly forget the faults of taste which
accompany them, the affectation, the uncouth jargon.
Is it really so uncouth ? Imagine a man who with
closed eyes distinctly sees the adored countenance of
his mistress, who keeps it before him all the day ; who
is troubled and shaken as he imagines ever and anon
her brow, her lips, her eyes ; who cannot and will not
be separated from his vision ; who sinks daily deeper
in this passionate contemplation ; who is every instant
crushed by mortal anxieties, or transported by the
raptures of bliss : he will lose the exact conception of
objects. A fixed idea becomes a false idea. By dint
of regarding an object under all its forms, turning it

CHAP. i. THE PAGAN RENAISSANCE. 271

over, piercing through it, we at last deform it. When
we cannot think of a thing without being dazed and
without tears, we magnify it, and give it a character
which it has not. Hence strange comparisons, over-
refined ideas, excessive images, become natural. How-
ever far Sidney goes, whatever object he touches, he
sees throughout the universe only the name and features
of .Stella. All ideas bring him back to her. He is
drawn ever and invincibly by the same thought : and
comparisons which seem far-fetched, only express the
unfailing presence and sovereign power of the besetting
image. Stella is ill; it seems to Sidney that "Joy,
which is inseparate from those eyes, Stella, now learnes
(strange case) to weepe in thee." l To us, the expression
is absurd. Is it so for Sidney, who for hours together
had dwelt on the expression of those eyes, seeing in
them at last all the beauties of heaven and earth, who,
compared to them, finds all light dull and all happiness
stale ? Consider that in every extreme passion ordinary
laws are reversed, that our logic cannot pass judgment
on it, that we find in it affectation, childishness, witti-
cisms, crudity, folly, and that to us violent conditions
of the nervous machine are like an unknown and
marvellous land, where common sense and good language
cannot penetrate. On the return of spring, when May
spreads over the fields her dappled dress of new flowers,
Astrophel and Stella sit in the shade of a retired grove,
in the warm air, full of birds' voices and pleasant
exhalations. Heaven smiles, the wind kisses the
trembling leaves, the inclining trees interlace their
sappy branches, amorous earth swallows greedily the
rippling water :

1 Astrophel and Stella, ed. fol. 1629, 101st sonnet, p. 618

272 THE RENAISSANCE. BOOK IL

" In a grove most rich of shade,
Where birds wanton musicke made,
May, then yong, his py'd weeds showing,
New perfum'd with flowers fresh growing,

" Astrophel with Stella sweet,
Did for mutuall comfort meet,
Both within themselves oppressed,
But each in the other blessed. . . .

" Their eares hungry of each word,
Which the deere tongue would afford,
But their tongues restrain'd from walking.
Till their hearts had ended talking.

" But when their tongues could not speake,
Love it selfe did silence breake ;
Love did set his lips asunder,
Thus to speake in love and wonder. . . .

<J This small winde which so sweet is,
See how it the leaves doth kisse,
Each tree in his best attyring,
Sense of love to love inspiring." !

On his knees, with beating heart, oppressed, it seems tc
him that his mistress becomes transformed ;

" Stella, soveraigne of my joy, . , .
Stella, starre of heavenly fire,
Stella, load-starre of desire,
Stella, in whose shining eyes
Are the lights of Cupid's skies. . . .
Stella, whose voice when it speakes
Senses all asunder breakes ;
Stella, whose voice when it singeth,
Angels to acquaintance bringeth." 2

1 A-jtrophel aiid Stella (1629), 8th song, p. 603. f Ibid. 604

CHAP. i. THE PAGAN RENAISSANCE. 273

These cries of adoration are like a hymn. Every day
he writes thoughts of love which agitate him, and in
this long journal of a hundred pages we feel the
heated hreath swell each moment. A smile from his
mistress, a curl lifted by the wind, a gesture, — all are
events. He paints her in every attitude ; he cannot
see her too constantly. He talks to the birds, plants,
winds, all nature. He brings the whole world to
Stella's feet. At the notion of a kiss he swoons :

" Thinke of that most gratefull time
When thy leaping heart will climbe.
In my lips to have his biding.

There those roses for to kisse,

Which doe breath a sugred blisse,
Opening rubies, pearles dividing." l

" 0 joy, too high for my low stile to show :
0 blisse, fit for a nobler state then me :
Envie, put out thine eyes, lest thou do see

What Oceans of delight in me do flow.

My friend, that oft saw through all maskes my wo,
Come, come, and let me powre my selfe on thee :
Gone is the winter of my iniserie,

My spring appeares, 0 see what here doth grow,

For Stella hath with words where faith doth shine,
Of her high heart giv'n me the monarchic :

I, I, 0 I may say that she is mine." 2

There are Oriental splendours in the dazzling sonnet in
which he asks why Stella's cheeks have grown pale :

" Where be those Roses gone, which sweetned so our eyes ?
Where those red cheekes, which oft with faire encrease doth
frame

1 Astrophel and Stella, 10th song, p. 610. a Ibid, sonnet 69, p. 656.
VOL. I. T

274 THE RENAISSANCE. BOOK a

The height of honour in the kindly badge of shame ?

Who hath the crimson weeds stolne from my morning skies 1 l

As he says, his " life melts with too much thinking."
Exhausted by ecstasy, he pauses ; then he flies from
thought to thought, seeking relief for his wound, like

the Satyr whom he describes :

/

" Prometheus, when first from heaven hie
He brought downe fire, ere then on earth not scene,
Fond of delight, a Satyr standing by
Gave it a kisse, as it like sweet had beene.

" Feeling forthwith the other burning power,
Wood with the smart with showts and shryking shrill,
He sought his ease in river, field, and bower,
But for the time his griefe went with him still." 2

At last calm returned ; and whilst this calm lasts, the
lively, glowing spirit plays like a flickering flame on the
surface of the deep brooding fire. His love-songs and
word-portraits, delightful pagan and chivalric fancies,
seem to be inspired by Petrarch or Plato. We feel the
charm and sportiveness under the seeming affectation :

" Faire eyes, sweete lips, deare heart, that foolish I
Could hope by Cupids helpe on you to pray ;
Since to himselfe he doth your gifts apply,
As his maine force, choise sport, and easefull stray.

" For when he will see who dare him gainsay,
Then with those eyes he lookes, lo by and by
Each soule doth at Loves feet his weapons lay,
Glad if for her he give them leave to die.

1 Astrophel and Stella, sonnet 102, p. 614.

8 Ibid. p. 525 : this sonnet is headed E. D. Wood, in his Athen.
Oaeon. i., says it was written by Sir Edward Dyer, Chancellor of the
Most noble Order of the Garter.— TR.

CHAP. i. THE PAGAN RENAISSANCE. 275

" When he will play, then in her lips he is,
Where blushing red, that Loves selfe them doth love,
With either lip he doth the other kisse :
But when he will for quiets sake remove
From all the world, her heart is then his rome,
Where well he knowes, no man to him can come." '

Both heart and sense are captive here. If he finds the
eyes of Stella more beautiful than anything in the world,
he finds her soul more lovely than her body. He is a
Platonist when he recounts how Virtue, wishing to be
loved of men, took Stella's form to enchant their eyes,
and make them see the heaven which the inner sense
reveals to heroic souls. We recognise in him that
entire submission of heart, love turned into a religion,
perfect passion which asks only to grow, and which, like
the piety of the mystics, finds itself always too insignifi-
cant when it compares itself with the object loved :

" My youth doth waste, my knowledge brings forth toyes,
My wit doth strive those passions to defend,
Which for reward spoyle it with vaine annoyes,
I see my course to lose my selfe doth bend :
I see and yet no greater sorrow take,
Than that I lose no more for Stella's sake." 2

At last, like Socrates in the banquet, he turns his eyes
to deathless beauty, heavenly brightness :

" Leave me, 0 Love, which reachest but to dust,
And thou my minde aspire to higher things :
Grow rich in that which never taketh rust :
Whatever fades, but fading pleasure brings. . . .
0 take fast hold, let that light be thy guide,
In this small course which birth drawes out to death.** 8

1 Astrophel and Stella, sonnet 43, p. 545.
* Ibid, sonnet 18, p. 573. 3 Last sonnet, p. 539.

276 THE RENAISSANCE. BOOK IL

Divine love continues the earthly love; he was im-
prisoned in this, and frees himself. By this nobility,
these lofty aspirations, recognise one of those serious
souls of which there are so many in the same climate
and race. Spiritual instincts pierce through the
dominant paganism, and ere they make Christians,
make Platonists.

V.

Sidney was only a soldier in an army ; there is a
multitude about him, a multitude of poets. In fifty-
two years, without counting the drama, two hundred and
thirty-three are enumerated,1 of whom forty have genius
or talent : Breton, Donne, Drayton, Lodge, Greene, the
two Fletchers, Beaumont, Spenser, Shakspeare, Ben
Jonson, Marlowe, Wither, Warner, Davison, Carew,
Suckling, Herrick ; — we should grow tired in counting
them. There is a crop of them, and so there is at the
same time in Catholic and heroic Spain ; and as in Spain
it was a sign of the times, the mark of a public want,
the index to an extraordinary and transient condition of
the mind. What is this condition which gives rise to
so universal a taste for poetry? What is it breathes
life into their books ? How happens it, that amongst
the least, in spite of pedantries, awkwardnesses, in the
rhyming chronicles or descriptive cyclopedias, we meet
with brilliant pictures and genuine love-cries ? How
happens it, that when this generation was exhausted,
true poetry ended in England, as true painting in Italy
and Flanders? It was because an epoch of the mind
came and passed away, — that, namely, of instinctive and

1 Nathan Drake, Shakspeare and his Times, i. Part 2, ch. 2, 3, 4.
Among these 233 poets the authors of isolated pieces are not reckoned,
but only those who published or collected their works.

CHAP. i. THE PAGAN RENAISSANCE. 277

creative conception. These men had new senses; and
no theories in their heads. Thus, when they took a
walk their emotions were not the same as ours.
What is sunrise to an ordinary man ? A white
srnudge on the edge of the sky, between bosses of
clouds, amid pieces of land, *and bits of road, which
he does not see because he has seen them a hundred
times. But for them, all things have a soul ; I mean
that they feel within themselves, indirectly, the up-
rising and severance of the outlines, the power and
contrast of tints, the sad or delicious sentiment, which
breathes from this combination and union like a harmony
or a cry. How sorrowful is the sun, as he rises in a
mist above the sad sea-furrows ; what an air of resigna-
tion in the old trees rustling in the night rain ; what a
feverish tumult in the mass of waves, whose dishevelled
locks are twisted for ever on the surface of the abyss !
But the great torch of heaven, the luminous god,
emerges and shines ; the tall, soft, pliant herbs, the
evergreen meadows, the expanding roof of lofty oaks, —
the whole English landscape, continually renewed and
illumined by the flooding moisture, diffuses an inex-
haustible freshness. These meadows, red and white
with flowers, ever moist and ever young, slip off their
veil of golden mist, and appear suddenly, timidly, like
beautiful virgins. Here is the cuckoo-flower, which
s prings up before the corning of the swallow ; there the
hare-bell, blue as the veins of a woman ; the marigold,
which sets with the sun, and, weeping, rises with him.
Dray ton, in his Polyolbion, sings
" Then from her burnisht gate the goodly glittring East
Guilds every lofty top, which late the humorous Night
Bespangled had with pearle, to please the Mornings sight ;

278 THE RENAISSANCE. BOOK 11

On which the mirthfull Quires, with their cleere open throats,
Unto the joyfull Morne so straine their warbling notes,
That Hills and Valleys ring, and even the ecchoing Ayre
Seeraes all compos'd of sounds, about them everywhere. . . .
Thus sing away the Morne, untill the mounting Sunne,
Through thick exhaled fogs, his golden head hath runne,
And through the twisted tops of our close Covert creeps,
To kiss the gentle Shade, this while that sweetly sleeps."1

A step further, and you will find the old gods reappear.
They reappear, these living gods — these living gods
mingled with things which you cannot help meeting as
soon as you meet nature again. Shakspeare, in the
Tempest, sings :

" Ceres, most bounteous lady thy rich leas

Of wheat, rye, barley, vetches, oats, and pease ;
Thy turfy mountains, where live nibbling sheep,
And flat meads thatch'd with stover, them to keep ;
Thy banks with peoned and lilied brims,
Which spongy April at thy hest betrims,
To make cold nymphs chaste crowns . . .
Hail, many-colour'd messenger (Iris.) . . .
Who, with thy saffron wings, upon my flowers
Diffusest honey-drops, refreshing showers,
And with each end of thy blue bow dost crown
My bosky acres and my unshrubb'd down." 2

In Gymbeline he says :

" They are as gentle as zephyrs, blowing below the violet,
Not wagging his sweet head."3

Greene writes :

" When Flora, proud in pomp of all her flowers,
Sat bright and gay,

1 M. Drayton's Polyolbion, ed. 1622, 13th song, p. 21 i.
s Act iv. 1. 3 Act iv. 2.

CHAP. i. THE PAGAN RENAISSANCE. 279

And gloried in the dew of Iris' showers,

And did display
Her mantle chequered all with gaudy green." *

The same author also says :

" How oft have I descending Titan seen,
His burning locks couch in the sea-queen's lap;
And beauteous Thetis his red body wrap
In watery robes, as he her lord had been ! " a

So Spenser, in his Fatrie Queene, sings :

" The ioyous day gan early to appeare ;
And fayre Aurora from the deawy bed
Of aged Tithone gan herselfe to reare
With rosy cheekes, for shame as blushing red :
Her golden locks, for hast, were loosely shed
About her eares, when Una her did marke
Clymbe to her charet, all with flowers spred,
From heven high to chace the chearelesse darke ;
With mery note her lowd salutes the mounting larke." 8

All the splendour and sweetness of this moist and well-
watered land; all the specialties, the opulence of its
dissolving tints, of its variable sky, its luxuriant vege-
tation, assemble thus about the gods, who gave them
their beautiful form.

In the life of every man there are moments when, in
presence of objects, he experiences a shock. This mass
of ideas, of mangled recollections, of mutilated images,
which lie hidden in all corners of his mind, are set in
motion, organised, suddenly developed like a flower.
He is enraptured ; he cannot help looking at and admir-

1 Greene's Poems, ed. Bell, Eurymachus in Laudem Mirimidtz, p. 73.

2 Ibid. Melicertics' description of his Mistress, p. 38.
8 Spenser's Works, ed. Todd, 1863, The Faerie Queene, i. c. 11, »t 5L

260 THE RENAISSANCE. BOOK 11.

ing the charming creature which has just appeared ; he
wishes to see it again, and others like it, and dreams of
nothing else. There are such moments in the life of
nations, and this is one of them. They are happy in
contemplating beautiful things, and wish only that they
should be the most beautiful possible. They are not pre-
occupied, as we are, with theories. They do not excite
themselves to express moral or philosophical ideas. They
wish to enjoy through the imagination, through the eyes,
like those Italian nobles, who, at the same time, were
so captivated by fine colours and forms, that they
covered with paintings not only their rooms and their
churches, but the lids of their chests and the saddles of
their horses. The rich and green sunny country; young,
gaily-attired ladies, blooming with health and love; half-
draped gods and goddesses, masterpieces and models of
strength and grace, — these are the most lovely objects
which man can contemplate, the most capable of satisfy-
ing his senses and his heart — of giving rise to smiles
and joy; and these are the objects which occur in
all the poets in a most wonderful abundance of songs,
pastorals, sonnets, little fugitive pieces, so lively, delicate,
easily unfolded, that we have never since had their
equals. What though Venus and Cupid have lost their
altars ? Like the contemporary painters of Italy, they
willingly imagine a beautiful naked child, drawn on a
chariot of gold through the limpid air; or a woman,
redolent with youth, standing on the waves, which kiss
her snowy feet. Harsh Ben Jonson is ravished with
the scene. The disciplined battalion of his sturdy
verses changes into a band of little graceful strophes,
which trip as lightly as Raphael's children. He sees
his lady approach, sitting on the chariot of Love, drawn

CHAP. i. THE PAGAN RENAISSANCE. 281

by swans and doves. Love leads the car; she passes
calm and smiling, and all hearts, charmed by her divine
looks, wish no other joy than to see and serve her for ever.

" See the chariot at hand here of Love,

Wherein my lady rideth !
Each that draws is a swan or a dove,

And well the car Love guideth.
As she goes, all hearts do duty
Unto her beauty ;

And, enamoured, do wish, so they might
But enjoy such a sight,
That they still were to run by her side,
Through swords, through seas, whither she would ride.
Do but look on her eyes, they do light

All that Love's world compriseth !
Do but look on her hair, it is bright

As Love's star when it riseth ! . . .
Have you seen but a bright lily grow,

Before rude hands have touched it ?
Have you marked but the fall o' the snow,

Before the soil hath smutched it 1
Have you felt the wool of beaver 1

Or swan's down ever 1
Or have smelt o' the bud o' the brier ?

Or the nard in the fire 1
Or have tasted the bag of the bee ?
0 so white ! 0 so soft ! 0 so sweet is she ! " l

What can be more lively, more unlike measured and
artificial mythology? Like Theocritus and Moschus,
they play with their smiling gods, and their belief
becomes a festival. One day, in an alcove of a wood,
Cupid meets a nymph asleep :

1 Ben Jonson's Poems, ed. R. Bell. Celebration of Chans; ken
Triumph, p. 125.

282 THE RENAISSANCE. BOOK u.

" Her golden hair o'erspread her face,

Her careless arms abroad were cast,
Her quiver had her pillow's placed,
Her breast lay bare to every blast." l

He approaches softly, steals her arrows, and puts his
own in their place. She hears a noise at last, raises
her reclining head, and sees a shepherd approaching.
She flees ; he pursues. She bends her bow, and shoots
her arrows at him. He only becomes more ardent, and
is on the point of seizing her. In despair, she takes an
arrow, and buries it in her lovely body. Lo ! she is
changed, she stops, smiles, loves, draws near him.

" Though mountains meet not, lovers may.
What other lovers do, did they.
The god of Love sat on a tree,
And laught that pleasant sight to see." 2

A drop of archness falls into the medley of artlessness
and voluptuous charm ; it was so in Longus, and in all
that delicious nosegay called the Anthology. Not the
dry mocking of Voltaire, of folks who possessed only
wit, and always lived in a drawing-room; but the
raillery of artists, lovers whose brain is full of colour
and form, who, when they recount a bit of roguishness,
imagine a stooping neck, lowered eyes, the blushing of
vermilion cheeks. One of these fair ones says the fol-
lowing verses, simpering, and we can even see now the
pouting of her lips :

" Love in my bosom like a bee
Doth suck his sweet.
Now with his wings he plays with me,
Now with his feet.

* Cupids Pastime, unknown author, ab. 1621. 3 Ibid.

CHAP. i. THE PAGAN RENAISSANCE. 283

Within my eyes he makes his rest,
His bed amid my tender breast,
My kisses are his daily feast.
And yet he robs me of my rest.
Ah ! wanton, will ye !

" '

What relieves these sportive pieces is their splendour
of imagination. There are effects and flashes which we
hardly dare quote, dazzling and maddening, as in the
Song of Songs :

" Her eyes, fair eyes, like to the purest lights
That animate the sun, or cheer the day ;
In whom the shining sunbeams brightly play,
Whiles fancy doth on them divine delights.

" Her cheeks like ripened lilies steeped in wine,
Or fair pomegranate kernels washed in milk,
Or snow-white threads in nets of crimson silk,
Or gorgeous clouds upon the sun's decline.

" Her lips are roses over-washed with dew,
Or like the purple of Narcissus' flower . . .

" Her crystal chin like to the purest mould,
Enchased with dainty daisies soft and white,
Where fancy's fair pavilion once is pight,
Whereas embraced his beauties he doth hold.

" Her neck like to an ivory shining tower,
Where through with azure veins sweet nectar runs,
Or like the down of swans where Senesse woons,
Or like delight that doth itself devour.

" Her paps are like fair apples in the prime,
As round as orient pearls, as soft as down ;
They never vail their fair through winter's frown,
But from their sweets love sucked his summer time." *

1 Rosalind's Madrigal.
* Greene's Poems, ed. R. Bell, Jlfenaphon's Eclogue, p. 41.

284 THE RENAISSANCE. BOOK it.

"What need compare, -where sweet exceeds compare1?
Who draws his thoughts of love from senseless things,
Their pomp and greatest glories doth impair,
And mounts love's heaven with overladen wings." l

I can well believe that things had no more beauty
then than now ; but I am sure that men found them
more beautiful.

When the power of embellishment is so great, it is
natural that they should paint the sentiment which
unites all joys, whither all dreams converge, — ideal love,
and in particular, artless and happy love. Of all
sentiments, there is none for which we have more
sympathy. It is of all the most simple and sweet.
It is the first motion of the heart, and the first word
of nature. It is made up of innocence and self-aban-
donment. It is clear of reflection and effort. It
extricates us from complicated passion, contempt, regret,
hate, violent desires. It penetrates us, and we breathe
it as the fresh breath of the morning wind, which has
swept over flowery meads. The knights of this peri-
lous court inhaled it, and were enraptured, and so
rested in the contrast from their actions and their
dangers. The most severe and tragic of their poets
turned aside to meet it, Shakspeare among the evergreen
oaks of the forest of Arden,2 Ben Jonson in the woods
of Sherwood,3 amid the wide shady glades, the shining
leaves and moist flowers, trembling on the margin of
lonely springs. Marlowe himself, the terrible painter
of the agony of Edward II., the impressive and powerful
poet, who wrote Faustus, Tamerlane, and the Jew of

1 Greene's Poems, Melicertus" Eclogue, p. 43. 2 As you Like it.
1 The Sad Shepherd. See also Beaumont and Fletcher, The Faith-
ful Shepherdess.

CHAP. i. THE PAGAN RENAISSANCE. 285

Malta, leaves his sanguinary dramas, his high-sounding
verse, his images of fury, and nothing can be more
musical and sweet than his song. A shepherd, to gain
his lady-love, says to her :

" Come live with me and be iny Love,
And we will all the pleasures prove
That hills and valleys, dale and field,
And all the craggy mountains yield.
There we will sit upon the rocks,
And see the shepherds feed their flocks,
By shallow rivers, to whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals.
There will I make thee beds of roses
And a thousand fragrant posies,
A cap of flowers, and a kirtle
Embroider'd all with leaves of myrtle.
A gown made of the finest wool,
Which from our pretty lambs we pull,
Fair line'd slippers for the cold,
With buckles of the purest gold.
A belt of straw and ivy buds,
With coral clasps and amber studs :
And if these pleasures may thee move,
Come live with me and be my Love. . . .
The shepherd swains shall dance and sing
For thy delight each May-morning :
If these delights thy mind may move,
Then live with me and be my Love" J

1 This poem was, and still is, frequently attributed to Shakspeare.
It appears as his in Knight's edition, published a few years ago. Isaac
Walton, however, writing about fifty years after Marlowe's death,
attributes it to him. In Palgrave's Golden Treasury it is also ascribed
to the same author. As a confirmation, let us state that Ithamore, in
Marlowe's Jew of Malta, says to the courtesan (Act iv. Sc. 4) :
' ' Thou in those groves, by Dis above,
Shalt live with me, and be my love." — TF.

286 THE RENAISSANCE. BOOK n.

The unpolished gentlemen of the period, returning from
hawking, were more than once arrested by such rustic
pictures ; such as they were, that is to say, imaginative
and not very citizen-like, they had dreamed of figuring
in them on their own account. But while entering into,
they reconstructed them; they reconstructed them in
their parks, prepared for Queen Elizabeth's entrance, with
a profusion of costumes and devices, not troubling them-
selves to copy rough nature exactly. Improbability
did not disturb them ; they were not minute imitators,
students of manners : they created ; the country for them
was but a setting, and the complete picture came from
their fancies and their hearts. Eomantic it may have
been, even impossible, but it was on this account the
more charming. Is there a greater charm than putting
on one side this actual world which fetters or oppresses
us, to float vaguely and easily in the azure and the
light, on the summit of the cloud-capped land of fairies,
to arrange things according to the pleasure of the
moment, no longer feeling the oppressive laws, the
harsh and resisting framework of life, adorning and
varying everything after the caprice and the refinements
of fancy ? That is what is done in these little poems.
Usually the events are such as happen nowhere, or
happen in the land where kings turn shepherds and
marry shepherdesses. The beautiful Argentile1 is de-
tained at the court of her uncle, who wishes to deprive
her of her kingdom, and commands her to marry Curan,
a boor in his service; she flees, and Curan in despair
goes and lives two years among the shepherds. One
day he meets a beautiful country-woman, and loves her ;

1 Chalmers' English Poets, "William Warner, Fourth Book of Albion 't
England, ch. xx. p. 551.

CHAP. I. THE PAGAN RENAISSANCE. 287

gradually, while speaking to her, he thinks of Argentile,
and weeps ; he describes her sweet face, her lithe figure,
her blue- veined delicate wrists, and suddenly sees that
the peasant girl is weeping, She falls into his arms,
and says, " I am Argentile." Now Curan was a king's
son, who had disguised himself thus for love of Argen-
tile. He resumes his armour, and defeats the wicked
king. There never was a braver knight; and they
both reigned long in Northumberland. From a hundred
such tales, tales of the spring-time, the reader will
perhaps bear with me while I pick out one more, gay
and simple as a May morning. The Princess Dowsabel
came down one morning into her father's garden ; she
gathers honeysuckles, primroses, violets, and daisies;
then, behind a hedge, she heard a shepherd singing,
and that so finely that she loved him at once. He
promises to be faithful, and asks for a kiss. Her cheeks
became as crimson as a rose :

" With that she bent her snow white knee,
Down by the shepherd kneeled she,

And him she sweetly kiss'd.
With that the shepherd whqpp'd for joy ;
Quoth he : ' There's never shepherd's boy

That ever was so blest.' " l

Nothing more ; is it not enough ? It is but a moment's
fancy; but they had such fancies every moment.
Think what poetry was likely to spring from them,
how superior to common events, how free from literal
imitation, how smitten with ideal beauty, how capable
of creating a world beyond our sad world. In fact,
among all these poems there is one truly divine, so

1 Chalmers1 English Poets, M. Drayton's F<ntrth Eclogue, iv. p. 436.

288 THE KENAISSANCK BOOK n.

divine that the reaeoners of succeeding ages have found
it wearisome, that even now but few understand it —
Spenser's Faerie Queene.

One day Monsieur Jourdain, having turned Mama-
mouchi1 and learned orthography, sent for the most
illustrious writers of the age. He settled himself in
his arm-chair, pointed with his ringer at several folding-
stools for them to sit down, and said :

" I have read your little productions, gentlemen. They have
afforded me much pleasure. I wish to give you some work to
do. I have given some lately to little Lulli,1 your fellow-
labourer. It was at my command that he introduced the sea-
shell at his concerts, — a melodious instrument, which no one
thought of before, and which has such a pleasing effect. I insist
that you will work out my ideas as he has worked them out, and
I give you an order for a poem in prose. What is not pros^, you
know, is verse ; and what is not verse, is prose. When I say,
1 Nicolle, bring me my slippers and give me my nightcap/ I speak
prose. Take this sentence as your model. This style is much
more pleasing than the jargon of unfinished lines which you call
verse. As for the subject, let it be myself. You will describe
my flowered dressing-gown which I have put on to receive you
in, and this little green velvet undress which I wear underneath,
to do my morning exercise in. You will set down that this
chintz costs a louis an ell. The description, if well worked out
will furnish some very pretty paragraphs, and will enlighten the
public as to the cost of things. I desire also that you should
speak of my mirrors, my carpets, my hangings. My tradesmen
will let you have their bills ; don't fail to put them in. I shall
be glad to read in your works, all fully and naturally set forth,
about my father's shop, who, like a real gentleman, sold cloth to

1 Mons. Jourdain is the hero of Moliere's comedy, Le Bourgeois
Oentilhomme, the type of a vulgar and successful upstart ; Mamamouchi
is a mock title. — TR. .

3 Lulli, a celebrated Italian composer of the time of Moliere.— TR.

CHAP. i. THE PAGAN RENAISSANCE. 289

oblige his friends ; my maid Nicolle's kitchen, the genteel be-
havdour of Brusquet, the little dog of my neighbour M. Dimanche.
You might also explain my domestic affairs : there is nothing
more interesting to the public than to hear how a million may
be scraped together. Tell them also that my daughter Lucile
has not married that little rascal Cle'oate, but M. Samuel Bernard,
who made his fortune as a fermier-gtnSral, keeps his carriage and
is going to be a minister of state. For this I will pay you liber-
ally, half-a-louis for a yard of writing. Come back in a month,
and let me see what my ideas have suggested to you."

We are the descendants of M. Jourdain, and this is
how we have been talking to the men of genius from
the beginning of the century, and the men of genius
have listened to us. Hence arise our shoppy and
realistic novels. I pray the reader to forget them, to
forget himself, to become for a while a poet, a gentle-
man, a man of the sixteenth century. Unless we bury
the M. Jourdain who survives in us, we shall never
understand Spenser.

VI.

Spenser belonged to an ancient family, allied to
great houses ; was a friend of Sidney and Ealeigh, the
two most accomplished knights of the age — a knight
himself, at least in heart ; who had found in his con-
nections, his friendships, his studies, his life, everything
calculated to lead him to ideal poetry. We find him
at Cambridge, where he imbues himself with the noblest
ancient philosophies ; in a northern country, where he
passes through a deep and unfortunate passion; at
Penshurst, in the castle and in the society where the
Arcadia was produced ; with Sidney, in whom survived
entire the romantic poetry and heroic generosity of the

VOL I. u

290 THE RENAISSANCE. BOOK u.

feudal spirit; at court, where all the splendours of a
disciplined and gorgeous chivalry were gathered about
the throne; finally, at Kilcolinan, on the borders of a
beautiful lake, in a lonely castle, from which the view
embraced an amphitheatre of mountains, and the half
of Ireland. Poor on the other hand,1 not fit for court,
and though favoured by the queen, unable to obtain
from his patrons anything but inferior employment ;
in the end, wearied of solicitations, and banished to
his dangerous property in Ireland, whence a rebellion
expelled him, after his house and child had been burned ;
he died three months later, of misery and a broken
heart.2 Expectations and rebuffs, many sorrows and
many dreams, some few joys, and a sudden and fright-
ful calamity, a small fortune and a premature end ;
this indeed was a poet's life. But the heart within
was the true poet — from it all proceeded; circum-
stances furnished the subject only; he transformed
them more than they him ; he received less than he
gave. Philosophy and landscapes, ceremonies and
ornaments, splendours of the country and the court, on
all which he painted or thought, he impressed his
inward nobleness. Above all, his was a soul captivated
by sublime and chaste beauty, eminently platonic; one
of these lofty and refined souls most charming of all,
who, born in the lap of nature, draw thence their
sustenance, but soar higher, enter the regions of mysti-
cism, and mount instinctively in order to expand on the
confines of a loftier world. Spenser leads us to Milton,

1 It is very doubtful whether Spenser was so poor as ha is generally
believed to have been.— TR.

a " He died for want of bread, in King Street." Ben Jonson,
quoted by Drummond.

. THE PAGAN RENAISSANCE. 291

and thence to Puritanism, as Plato to Virgil, and thence
to Christianity. Sensuous beauty is perfect in both,
but their main worship is for moral beauty. He
appeals to the Muses :

" Revele to me the sacred noursery
Of vertue, which with you doth there remaine,
Where it in silver bowre does hidden ly
From view of men and wicked worlds disdaine ! "

He encourages his knight when he sees him droop.
He is wroth when he sees him attacked. He rejoices
in his justice, temperance, courtesy. He introduces in
the beginning of a song, long stanzas in honour of
friendship and justice. He pauses, after relating a
lovely instance of chastity, to exhort women to modesty.
He pours out the wealth of his respect and tenderness
at the feet of his heroines* If any coarse man insults
them, he calls to their aid nature and the gods. Never
does he bring them on his stage without adorning their
name with splendid eulogy. He has an adoration for
beauty worthy of Dante and Plotinus. And this,
because he never considers it a mere harmony of colour
and form, but an emanation of unique, heavenly, im-
perishable beauty, which no mortal eye can see, and
which is the masterpiece of the great Author of the
worlds.1 Bodies only render it visible ; it does not
live in them ; charm and attraction are not in things,
but in the immortal idea which shines through them :
" For that same goodly hew of white and red,
With which the cheekes are sprinckled, shall decay,
And those sweete rosy leaves, so fairly spred
Upon the lips, shall fade and fall away
To that they were, even to corrupted clay :
1 Hymns of Love and Beauty ; of heavenly Love and Beauty.

292 THE RENAISSANCE. BOOK IL

That golden wyre, those sparckling stars so bright,
Shall turne to dust, and lose their goodly light.
But that faire lainpe, from whose celestiall ray
That light proceedes, which kindleth lovers fire,
Shall never be extinguisht nor decay ;
But, when the vitall spirits doe expyre,
Upon her native planet shall retyre ;
For it is heavenly borne, and cannot die,
Being a parcell of the purest side." l

In presence of this ideal of beauty, love is transformed :

" For Love is lord of Truth and Loialtie,
Lifting himself out of the lowly dust,
On golden plumes up to the purest skie,
Above the reach of loathly sinfull lust,
Whose base affect through cowardly distrust
Of his weake wings dar^e not to heaven fly,
But like a moldwarpe in the earth doth ly." 2

Love such as this contains all that is good, and fine,
and noble. It is the prime source of life, and the
eternal soul of things. It is this love which, pacifying
the primitive discord, has created the harmony of the
spheres, and maintains this glorious universe. It dwells
in God, and is God Himself, come down in bodily form
to regenerate the tottering world and save the human
race ; around and within animated beings, when our
eyes can pierce outward appearances, we behold it as a
living light, penetrating and embracing every creature.
We touch here the sublime sharp summit where the
world of mind and the world of sense unite ; where
man, gathering with both hands the loveliest flowers
of either, feels himself at the same time a pagan and a
Christian.

1 A Hymne in Honour of Beautie, L 92-105.

2 A Hymne in Honour of Love, L 176-182.

CHAP, i. THE PAGAN RENAISSANCE. 293

So much, as a testimony to his heart. But he was
also a poet, that is, pre-eminently a creator and a
dreamer, and that most naturally, instinctively, unceas-
ingly. We might go on for ever describing this inward
condition of all great artists ; there would still remain
much to be described. It is a sort of mental growth
with them ; at every instant a bud shoots forth, and on
this another and still another ; each producing, increas-
ing, blooming of itself, so that after a few moments we
find first a green plant crop up, then a thicket, then a
forest. A character appears to them, then an action,
then a landscape, then a succession of actions, characters,
landscapes, producing, completing, arranging themselves
by instinctive development, as when in a dream we
behold a train of figures which, without any outward
compulsion, display and group themselves before our
eyes. This fount of living and changing forms is in-
exhaustible in Spenser ; he is always imaging ; it is his
specialty. He has but to close his eyes, and apparitions
arise ; they abound in him, crowd, overflow ; in vain he
pours them forth ; they continually float up, more
copious and more dense. Many times, following the
inexhaustible stream, I have thought of the vapours
which rise incessantly from the sea, ascend, sparkle,
commingle their golden and snowy scrolls, while under-
neath them new mists arise, and others again beneath,
and the splendid procession never grows dim or ceases.
But what distinguishes him from all others is the
mode of his imagination. Generally with a poet his
mind ferments vehemently and by fits and starts ; his
ideas gather, jostle each other, suddenly appear in
masses and heaps, and burst forth in sharp, piercing,
concentrative words ; it seems that they need these

294 • THE RENAISSANCE. BOOK n

sudden accumulations to imitate the unity and life-like
energy of the objects which they reproduce; at least
almost all the poets of that time, Shakspeare at their
head, act thus. Spenser remains calm in the fervour
of invention. The visions which would be fever to
another, leave him at peace. They come and unfold
themselves before him, easily, entire, uninterrupted,
without starts. He is epic, that is, a narrator, not a
singer like an ode- writer, nor a mimic like a play- writer.
No modern is more like Homer. Like Homer and the
great epic- writers, he only presents consecutive and noble,
almost classical images, so nearly ideas, that the mind
seizes them unaided and unawares. Like Homer, he is
always simple and clear : he makes no leaps, he omits
no argument, he robs no word of its primitive and
ordinary meaning, he preserves the natural sequence of
ideas. Like Homer again, he is redundant, ingenuous,
even childish. He says everything, he puts down re-
flections which we have made beforehand ; he repeats
without limit his grand ornamental epithets. We can
see that he beholds objects in a beautiful uniform light,
with infinite detail ; that he wishes to show all this
detail, never fearing to see his happy dream change or
disappear ; that he traces its outline with a regular
movement, never hurrying or slackening. He is even
a little prolix, too unmindful of the public, too ready to
lose himself and dream about the things he beholds.
His thought expands in vast repeated comparisons, like
those of the old Ionic poet. If a wounded giant falls,
he finds him

" As an aged tree,

Higli growing on the top of rocky clift,
Whose hart-strings with keene steele nigh hewen be.

CTIAP. i. THE PAGAN RENAISSANCE. 295

The mightie trunck halfe rent with ragged rift.

Doth roll adowne the rocks, and fall with fearefull drift.

Or as a castle, reared high and round,
By subtile engins and malitious slight
Is undermined from the lowest ground,
And her foundation forst, and feebled quight,
At last downe falles ; and with her heaped hight
Her hastie mine does more heavie make,
And yields it selfe unto the victours might :
Such was this Gyaunt's fall, that seemd to shake
The stedfast globe of earth, as it for feare did quake." '

He develops alJ the ideas which he handles. All his
phrases become periods. Instead of compressing, he
expands. To bear this ample thought and its accom-
panying train, he requires a long stanza, ever renewed,
long alternate verses, reiterated rhymes, whose uniform-
ity and fulness recall the majestic sounds which undulate
eternally through the woods and the fields. To unfold
these epic faculties, and to display them in the sublime
region where his soul is naturally borne, he requires an
ideal stage, situated beyond the bounds of reality, with
personages who could hardly exist, and in a world which
could never be.

He made many miscellaneous attempts in sonnets,
elegies, pastorals, hymns of love, little sparkling word
pictures ;2 they were but essays, incapable for the most
part of supporting his genius. Yet already his magni-
ficent imagination appeared in them ; gods, men,
landscapes, the world which he sets in motion is a

1 The Faerie Qwene, I c. 8, st. 22, 23.

2 The Shepherd's Calendar, Amoretti, Sonnets, Prothalamion, Epv-
fhalamion, Muiopotmos, Virgil's Gnat, The Ruines of Time, The Teares
of Me Muses, etc.

296 THE RENAISSANCE. BOOK n.

thousand miles from that in which we live. His Shep-
herd's Calendar l is a thought-inspiring and tender pas-
toral, full of delicate loves, noble sorrows, lofty ideas,
where no voice is heard but of thinkers and poets. His
Visions of Petrarch and Du Bellay are admirable dreams,
in which palaces, temples of gold, splendid landscapes,
sparkling rivers, marvellous birds, appear in close suc-
cession as in an Oriental fairy-tale. If he sings a
" Prothalamion," he sees two beautiful swans, white as
snow, who come softly swimming down amidst the
songs of nymphs and vermeil roses, while the trans-
parent water kisses their silken feathers, and murmurs
with joy :

" There, in a meadow, by the river's side.
A flocke of Nymphes I chaunced to espy,
All lovely daughters of the Flood thereby,
With goodly greenish locks, all loose untyde,
As each had bene a bryde ;
And each one had a little wicker basket,
Made of fine twigs, entrayled curiously,
In which they gathered flowers to fill their flasket,
And with fine fingers cropt full feateously
The tender stalkes on hye.
Of every sort, which in that meadow grew,
They gathered some ; the violet, pallid blew,
The little dazie, that at evening closes,
The virgin lillie, and the primrose trew,
With store of vermeil roses,
To deck their bridegroomes posies
Against the brydale-day, which was not long :

Sweet Themmes ! runne softly, till I end my song.

1 Published in 1589 ; dedicated to Philip Sidney.

CHAP. i. THE PAGAN RENAISSANCE. 297

With that I saw two Swannes of goodly hewe

Come softly swimming downe along the lee ;

Two fairer birds I yet did never see ;

The snow, which doth the top of Pindus strew,

Did never whiter shew . . .

So purely white they were,

That even the gentle stream, the which them bare,

Seem'd foule to them, and bad his billowes spare

To wet their silken feathers, least they might

Soyle their fayre plumes with water not so fayre,

And marre their beauties bright,

That shone as heavens light,

Against their brydale day, which was not long :

Sweet Themmes ! runne softly, till I end my song ! " 1

If he bewails the death of Sidney, Sidney becomes a
shepherd ; he is slain like Adonis ; around him gather
weeping nymphs :

" The gods, which all things see, this same beheld,
And, pittying this paire of lovers trew,
Transformed them there lying on the field,
Into one flowre that is both red and blew :
It first growes red, and then to blew doth fade,
Like Astrophel, which thereinto was made.

And in the midst thereof a star appeares,

As fairly formd as any star in skyes :

Resembling Stella in her freshest yeares,

Forth darting beames of beautie from her eyes ;

And all the day it staiideth full of deow,

Which is the teares, that from her eyes did flow."2

His most genuine sentiments become thus fairy-like.
Magic is the mould of his mind, and impresses its shape

1 Prothalamion, L 19-54. 2 Astrophel, L 181-192.

298 THE KENAISSANCE. BOOK n.

on all that he imagines or thinks. Involuntarily he
robs objects of their ordinary form. If he looks at a
landscape, after an instant he sees it quite differently.
He carries it, unconsciously, into an enchanted land ;
the azure heaven sparkles like a canopy of diamonds,
meadows are clothed with flowers, a biped population
flutters in the balmy air, palaces of jasper shine among
the trees, radiant ladies appear on carved balconies above
galleries of emerald. This unconscious toil of mind is
like the slow crystallisations of nature. A moist twig
is cast into the bottom of a mine, and is brought out
again a hoop of diamonds.

At last he finds a subject which suits him, the
greatest joy permitted to an artist. He removes his
epic, from the common ground which, in the hands of
Homer and Dante, gave expression to a living creed,
and depicted national heroes. He leads us to the
summit of fairy-land, soaring above history, on that
extreme verge where objects vanish and pure idealism
begins : " I have undertaken a work," he says, " to
represent all the moral vertues, assigning to every vertue
a knight to be the patron and defender of the same ; in
whose actions and feats of armes and chivalry the
operations of that vertue, whereof he is the protector,
are to be expressed, and the vices and unruly appetites
that oppose themselves against the same, to be beaten
downe and overcome." l In fact, he gives us an allegory
as the foundation of his poem, not that he dreams of
becoming a wit, a preacher of moralities, a propounder
of riddles. He does not subordinate image to idea ; he
is a seer, not a philosopher. They are living men and

1 Words attributed to him by Lodowick Bryskett, Discourse of Civil
Life, ed. 1606, p. 26.

CHAP. i. THE PAGAN RENAISSANCE. 299

actions which he sets in motion ; only from time to
time, in his poem, enchanted palaces, a whole train of
splendid visions trembles and divides like a mist, en-
abling us to catch a glimpse of the thought which raised
and arranged it. When in his Garden of Adonis we
see the countless forms of all living things arranged in
due order, in close compass, awaiting life, we conceive
with him the birth of universal love, the ceaseless
fertility of the great mother, the mysterious swarm of
creatures which rise in succession from her " wide wombe
of the world." When we see his Knight of the Cross
combating with a horrible woman-serpent in defence of
his beloved lady Una; we dimly remember that, if we
search beyond these two figures, we shall find behind one,
Truth, behind the other, Falsehood. We perceive that
/his characters are not flesh and blood, and that all
f these brilliant phantoms are phantoms, and nothing more.
I We take pleasure in their brilliancy, without believing
in their substantiality ; we are interested in their doings,
without troubling ourselves about their misfortunes.
We know that their tears and cries are not real. Our
emotion is purified and raised. We do not fall into
gross illusion ; we have that gentle feeling of knowing
ourselves to be dreaming. We, like him, are a thousand
leagues from actual life, beyond the pangs of painful
pity, unmixed terror, violent and bitter hatred. We
entertain only refined sentiments, partly formed, arrested
at the very moment they were about to affect us with
too sharp a stroke. They slightly touch us, and we
find ourselves happy in being extricated from a belief
which was beginning to be oppressive.

.

300 THE RENAISSANCE. BOOK n

VII.

What world could furnish materials to so elevated a
fancy ? One only, that of chivalry ; for none is so far
from the actual. Alone and independent in his castle,
freed from all the ties which society, family, toil,
usually impose on the actions of men, the feudal hero
had attempted every kind of adventure, but yet he
had done less than he imagined ; the boldness of his
deeds had been exceeded by the madness of his dreams.
For want of useful employment and an accepted rule,
his brain had laboured on an unreasoning and impossible
track, and the urgency of his wearisomeness had in-
creased beyond measure his craving for excitement.
Under this stimulus his poetry had become a world
of imagery. Insensibly strange conceptions had grown
and multiplied in his brains, one over the other, like
ivy woven round a tree, and the original trunk had
disappeared beneath their rank growth and their ob-
struction. The delicate fancies of the old Welsh poetry,
the grand ruins of the German epics, the marvellous
splendours of the conquered East, all the recollections
which four centuries of adventure had scattered among
the minds of men, had become gathered into one great
dream ; and giants, dwarfs, monsters, the whole medley
of imaginary creatures, of superhuman exploits and
splendid follies, were grouped around a unique con-
ception, exalted and sublime love, like courtiers pro-
strated at the feet of their king. It was an ample and
buoyant subject-matter, from which the great artists
of the age, Ariosto, Tasso, Cervantes, Eabelais, had
hewn their poems. But they belonged too completely
bo their own time, to admit of their belonging to one

CHAP. I. THE PAGAN RENAISSANCE. 301

which had passed.1 They created a chivalry afresh,
but it was not genuine. The ingenious Ariosto, an
ironical epicurean, delights his gaze with it, and grows
merry over it, like a man of pleasure, a sceptic who
rejoices doubly in his pleasure, because it is sweet, and
because it is forbidden. By his side poor Tasso,
inspired by a fanatical, revived, factitious Catholicism,
amid the tinsel of an old school of poetry, works on the
same subject, in sickly fashion, with great effort and
scant success. Cervantes, himself a knight, albeit he
loves chivalry for its nobleness, perceives its folly, and
crushes it to the ground, with heavy blows, in the
mishaps of the wayside inns. More coarsely, more
openly, Eabelais, a rude commoner, drowns it with a
burst of laughter, in his merriment and nastiness.
Spenser alone takes it seriously and naturally. He is \
on the level of so much nobleness, dignity, reverie. He
is not yet settled and shut in by that species of exact
common sense which was to found and cramp the whole
modern civilisation. In his heart he inhabits the
poetic and shadowy land from which men were daily
drawing further and further away. He is enamoured
of it, even to its very language ; he revives the old
words, the expressions of the middle-age, the style
of Chaucer, especially in the Shepherd's Calendar. He
enters straightway upon the strangest dreams of the
old story-tellers, without astonishment, like a man
who has still stranger dreams of his own. En-
chanted castles, monsters and giants, duels in the
woods, wandering ladies, all spring up under his hands,
the mediaeval fancy with the mediaeval generosity ;

1 Ariosto, 1474-1533. Tasso, 1544-1595. Cervantes, 1547-1616.
Rabelais, 1483-1553.

302 THE RENAISSANCE. BOOK IL

and it is just because this world is unreal that it so
suits his humour.

Is there in chivalry sufficient to furnish him with
matter ? That is but one world, and he has another.
Beyond the valiant men, the glorified images of moral
virtues, he has the gods, finished models of sensible
beauty ; beyond Christian chivalry he has the pagan
Olympus; beyond the idea of heroic will which can
only be satisfied by adventures and danger, there exists
calm energy, which, by its own impulse, is in harmony
with actual existence. For such a poet one ideal is
not enough ; beside the beauty of effort he places the
beauty of happiness ; he couples them, not deliberately
as a philosopher, nor with the design of a scholar like
Goethe, but because they are both lovely; and here
and there, amid armour and passages of arms, he
distributes satyrs, nymphs, Diana, Venus, like Greek
statues amid the turrets and lofty trees of an English
park. There is nothing forced in the union ; the ideal
epic, like a superior heaven, receives and harmonises
the two worlds ; a beautiful pagan dream carries on a
beautiful dream of chivalry ; the link consists in the
tact that they are both beautiful. At this elevation
the poet has ceased to observe the differences of races
and civilisations. He can introduce into his picture
whatever he will ; his only reason is, " That suited ;"
and there could be no better. Under the glossy-leaved
oaks, by the old trunk so deeply rooted in the ground,
he can see two knights cleaving each other, and the next
instant a company of Fauns who came there to dance.
The beams of light which have poured down upon the
velvet moss, the green turf of an English forest, can
reveal the dishevelled locks and white shoulders of

CHAP. i. THE PAGAN RENAISSANCE. 303

nymphs. Do we not see it iu Eubens ? And what
signify discrepancies in the happy and sublime illu-
sion of fancy ? Are there more discrepancies ? Who
perceives them, who feels them ? Who does not feel,
on the contrary, that to speak the truth, there is but
one world, that of Plato and the poets ; that actual
phenomena are but outlines — mutilated, incomplete and
blurred outlines — wretched abortions scattered here and
there on Time's track, like fragments of clay, half
moulded, then cast aside, lying in an artist's studio ;
that, after all, invisible forces and ideas, which for ever
renew the actual existences, attain their fulfilment only
in imaginary existences ; and that the poet, in order to
express nature in its entirety, is obliged to embrace in
his sympathy all the ideal forms by which nature reveals
itself? This is the greatness of his work; he has suc-
ceeded in seizing beauty in its fulness, because he cared
for nothing but beauty.

The reader will feel that it is impossible to give in full
the plot of such a poem. In fact, there are six poems,
each of a dozen cantos, in which the action is ever diverg-
ing and converging again, becoming confused and starting
again ; and all the imaginings of antiquity and of the
middle-age are, I believe, combined in it. The knight
" pricks along the plaine," among the trees, and at a
crossing of the paths meets other knights with whom
he engages in combat ; suddenly from within a cave
appears a monster, half woman and half serpent, sur-
rounded by a hideous offspring ; further on a giant, with
three bodies ; then a dragon, great as a hill, with sharp
talons and vast wings. For three days he fights him,
and twice overthrown, he comes to himself only by aid
of " a gracious ointment." After that there are savage

304 THE RENAISSANCE. BOOK n.

tribes to be conquered, castles surrounded by flames to
be taken. Meanwhile ladies are wandering in the
midst of forests, on white palfreys, exposed to the
assaults of miscreants, now guarded by a lion which
follows them, now delivered by a band of satyrs who
adore them. Magicians work manifold charms ; palaces
display their festivities ; tilt-yards provide endless
tournaments ; sea-gods, nymphs, fairies, kings, inter-
mingle'in these feasts, surprises, dangers.

You will say it is a phantasmagoria. What matter,
if we see it? And we do see it, for Spenser does.
His sincerity communicates itself to us. He is so much
at home in this world, that we end by finding ourselves
at home in it too. He shows no appearance of aston-
ishment at astonishing events ; he comes upon them so
naturally, that he makes them natural ; he defeats the
miscreants, as if he had done nothing else all his life.
Venus, Diana, and the old deities, dwell at his gate and
enter his threshold without his taking any heed of them.
His serenity becomes ours. We grow credulous and
happy by contagion, and to the same extent as he. How
could it be otherwise ? Is it possible to refuse credence
to a man who paints things for us with such accurate
details and in such lively colours ? Here with a dash
of his pen he describes a forest for you ; and are you
not instantly in it with him ? Beech trees with their
silvery stems, " loftie trees iclad with sommers pride,
did spred so broad, that heavens light did hide ; " rays
of light tremble on the bark and shine on the ground,
on the reddening ferns and low bushes, which, suddenly
smitten with the luminous track, glisten and glimmer.
Footsteps are scarcely heard on the thick beds of heaped
leaves ; and at distant intervals, on the tall herbage,

CHAP. i. THE PAGAN RENAISSANCE. 305

drops of dew are sparkling. Yet the sound of a horn
reaches us through the foliage ; how sweetly yet cheer-
fully it falls on the ear, amidst this vast silence ! It
resounds more loudly ; the clatter of a hunt draws near ;
" eft through the thicke they heard one rudely rush ; "
a nymph approaches, the most chaste and beautiful in
the world. Spenser sees her ; nay more, he kneels
before her :

" Her face so faire, as flesh it seemed not,
But hevenly pourtraict of bright angels hew,
Oleare as the skye, withouten blame or blot,
Through goodly mixture of complexions dew ;
And in her cheekes the vermeill red did shew
Like roses in a bed of lillies shed,
The which ambrosiall odours from them threw,
And gazers sence with double pleasure fed,
Hable to heale the sicke and to revive the ded.

In her faire eyes two living lamps did flame,

Kindled above at th' Hevenly Makers light,

And darted fyrie beames out of the same ;

So passing persant, and so wondrous bright,

That quite bereav'd the rash beholders sight :

In them the blinded god his lustfull fyre

To kindle oft assayd, but had no might ;

For, with dredd maiestie and awfull yre,

She broke his wanton darts, and quenched bace desyre.

Her yvorie forhead, full of bountie brave,
Like a broad table did itselfe dispred,
For Love his loftie triumphes to engrave,
And write the battailes of his great godhed :
All good and honour might therein be red ;
For there their dwelling was. And, when she spake,
Sweete wordes, like dropping honny, she did shed :
VOL. I. X

306 THE RENAISSANCE. BOOK 11.

And 'twixt the perles and rubins softly brake

A silver sound, that heavenly musicke seemd to make.

Upon her eyelids many Graces sate,

Under the shadow of her even browes,

Working belgardes and amorous retrate ;

And everie one her with a grace endowes,

And everie one with meekeiiesse to her bowes :

So glorious mirrhour of celestiall grace,

And soveraine moniinent of mortall vowes,

How shall frayle pen descrive her heavenly face,

For feare, through want of skill, her beauty to disgrace !

So faire, and thousand thousand times more faire,
She seemd, when she presented was to sight ;
And was yclad, for heat of scorching aire,
All in a silken Camus lilly whight,
Purfled upon with many a folded plight,
Which all above besprinckled was throughout
With golden aygulets, that glistred bright,
Like twinckling starres ; and all the skirt about
Was hemd with golden fringe.

Below her ham her weed did somewhat trayne,

And her streight legs most bravely were embayld

In gilden buskins of costly cordwayne,

All bard with golden bendes, which were entayld

With curious antickes, and full fayre aumayld :

Before, they fastned were under her knee

In a rich iewell, and therein entrayld

The ends of all the knots, that none might see

How they within their fouldings close enwrapped bee.

Like two faire marble pillours they were scene,
Which doe the temple of the gods support,
Whom all the people decke with girlands greene,
And honour in their festivall resort ;

CHAP. i. THE PAGAN RENAISSANCE. 307

Those same with stately grace and princely port
She taught to tread, when she herselfe would grace ;
But with the woody nymphes when she did play,
Or when the flying libbard she did chace,
She could them nimbly move, and after fly apace.

And in her hand a sharpe bore-speare she held,

And at her backe a bow and quiver gay,

Stuft with steel-headed dartes wherewith she queld

The salvage beastes in her victorious play,

Knit with a golden bauldricke which forelay

Athwart her snowy brest, and did divide

Her daintie paps ; which, like young fruit in May,

Now little gan to swell, and being tide

Through her thin weed their places only signifide.

Her yellow lockes, crisped like golden wyre,

About her shoulders weren loosely shed,

And, when the winde emongst them did inspyre,

They waved like a penon wyde dispred

And low behinde her backe were scattered :

And, whether art it were or heedlesse hap,

As through the flouring forrest rash she fled,

In her rude heares sweet flowres themselves did lap,

And flourishing fresh leaves and blossomes did enwrap."3

** The daintie rose, the daughter of her inorne,
More deare than life she tendered, whose flowre
The girlond of her honour did adorn e ;
Ne suffered she the midday es scorching powre.
Ne the sharp northerne wind thereon to showre ;
But lapped up her silken leaves most chayre,
Whenso the froward skye began to lowre ;
But, soone as calmed was the cristall ayre.
She did it fayre dispred, and let to tiorish fayre." 2

1 The Faerie Queene, ii. c. 3, st. 22-30
2 Ibid. iii. c. 5, st 51.

308 THE RENAISSANCE. BOOK u.

He is on his knees before her, I repeat, as a child on
Corpus Christi day, among flowers and perfumes, trans-
ported with admiration, so that he sees a heavenly light
in her eyes, and angel's tints on her cheeks, even
impressing into her service Christian angels and pagan
graces to adorn and wait upon her; it is love which
brings such visions before him ;

" Sweet love, that doth his golden wings embay
In blessed nectar and pure pleasures well."

Whence this perfect beauty, this modest and charm-
ing dawn, in which he assembles all the brightness, all
the sweetness, all the virgin graces of the full morning ?
What mother begat her, what marvellous birth brought
to light such a wonder of grace and purity ? One day,
in a sparkling, solitary fountain, where the sunbeams
shone, Chrysogone was bathing with roses and violets.

" It was upon a sommers shinie day,
When Titan faire his beames did display,
In a fresh fotmtaine, far from all mens vew,
She bath'd her brest the boyling heat t' allay ;
She bath'd with roses red and violets blew,
And all the sweetest flowers that in the forrest grew.
Till faint through yrkesome wearines adowne
Upon the grassy ground herselfe she layd
To sleepe, the whiles a gentle slombring swowne
Upon her fell all naked bare displayd." ]

The beams played upon her body, and " fructified " her.
The months rolled on. Troubled and ashamed, she
went into the " wildernesse," and sat down, "every
sence with sorrow sore opprest." Meanwhile Venus,

1 Tfte Faerie Queene. iii. c. 6. st. 6 and 7.

CHAP. i. THE PAGAN RENAISSANCE. 309

searching for her boy Cupid, who had mutinied and fled
from her, " wandered in the world." She had sought
him in courts, cities, cottages, promising " kisses sweet,
and sweeter tilings, unto the man that of him tydings
to her brings."

" Shortly unto the wastefull woods she caine,
Whereas she found the goddesse (Diana) with her crew.
After late chace of their embrewed game,
Sitting beside a fountaine in a rew ;
Some of them washing with the liquid dew
From off their dainty limbs the dusty sweat
And soyle, which did deforme their lively hew ;
Others lay shaded from the scorching heat
The rest upon her person gave attendance great.
She, having hong upon a bough on high
Her bow and painted quiver, had unlaste
Her silver buskins from her nimble thigh,
And her lanck loynes ungirt, and brests unbraste,
After her heat the breathing cold to taste ;
Her golden lockes, that late in tresses bright
Embreaded were for hindring of her haste,
Now loose about her shoulders hong uudight,
And were with sweet Ambrosia all besprinckled light." l

Diana, surprised thus, repulses Venus, " and gan to smile,
in scorne of her vaine playnt," swearing that if she
should catch Cupid, she would clip his wanton wings.
Then she took pity on the afflicted goddess, and set
herself with her to look for the fugitive. They came
to the " shady covert " where Chrysogone, in her sleep,
had given birth " unawares" to two lovely girls, "as faire
as springing day." Diana took one, and made her the
purest of all virgins. Venus carried off the other to the

1 The Faerie Queene, ill c. 6, st. 17 and 18.

310 THE RENAISSANCE. BOOK n

Garden of Adonis, " the first seminary of all things, that
are borne to live and dye ; " where Psyche, the bride
of Love, disports herself ; where Pleasure, their daughter,
wantons with the Graces ; where Adonis, " lapped in
flowres and pretious spycery," " liveth in eternal bliss,"
and came back to life through the breath of immortal
Love. She brought her up as her daughter, selected her
to be the most faithful of loves, and after long trials,
gave her hand to the good knight Sir Scudamore.

That is the kind of thing we meet with in the won-
drous forest. Are you ill at ease there, and do you wish
to leave it because it is wondrous ? At every bend in
the alley, at every change- of the light, a stanza, a word,
reveals a landscape or an apparition. It is morning,
the white dawn gleams faintly through the trees;
bluish vapours veil the horizon, and vanish in the
smiling air; the springs tremble and murmur faintly
amongst the mosses, and on high the poplar leaves
begin to stir and flutter like the wings of butterflies.
A knight alights from his horse, a valiant knight, who
has unhorsed many a Saracen, and experienced many
an adventure. He unlaces his helmet, and on a sudden
you perceive the cheeks of a young girl ;

" Which doft, her golden lockes, that were upbound
Still in a knot, unto her heeles downe traced,
And like a silken veile in corapasse round
About her backe and all her bodie wound ;
Like as the shining skie in summers night,
What time the dayes with scorching heat abound,
Is creasted all with lines of firie light,
That it prodigious seemes in common peoples sight."]

It is Britomart, a virgin and a heroine, like Clorinda

1 The Faerie Quetne, iv. c. ], st. 13.

CHAP. i. THE PAGAN RENAISSANCE. 311

or Marfisa,1 but how much more ideal ! The deep
sentiment of nature, the sincerity of reverie, the ever-
flowing fertility of inspiration, the German seriousness,
reanimate in this poem classical or chivalrous concep-
tions, even when they are the oldest or the most trite.
The train of splendours and of scenery never ends.
Desolate promontories, cleft with gaping chasms ; thun-
der-stricken and blackened masses of rocks, against
which the hoarse breakers dash ; palaces sparkling with
gold, wherein ladies, beauteous as angels, reclining
carelessly on purple cushions, listen with sweet smiles
to the harmony of music played by unseen hands ;
lofty silent walks, where avenues of oaks spread their
motionless shadows over clusters of virgin violets, and
turf which never mortal foot has trod; — to all these
beauties of art and nature he adds the marvels of
mythology, and describes them with as much of love
and sincerity as a painter of the Kenaissance or an
ancient poet. Here approach on chariots of shell,
Cymoent and her nymphs :

" A teme of dolphins raunged in aray
Drew the smooth charett of sad Cymoent ;
They were all taught by Triton to obay
To the long raynes at her commaundement :
As swifte as swallowes on the waves they went,
That their brode flaggy finnes no fome did reare,
Ne bubling rowndell they behinde them sent ;
The rest, of other fishes drawen weare ;
Which with their finny oars the swelling sea did sheare." 2

1 Clorinda, the heroine of the infidel army in Tasso's epic poem
Jerusalem Delivered ; Marfisa, an Indian Queen, who figures in Ariosto's
Orlando Furioso, and also in Boyardo's Orlando Innamorato. — Ta.

8 The Fairie Queene, iii. c. 4. st 33.

S12 THE RENAISSANCE. BOOK n.

Nothing, again, can be sweeter or calmer than the
description of the palace of Morpheus :

" He, making speedy way through spersed ayre,
And through the world of waters wide and deepe,
To Morpheus house doth hastily repaire.
Amid the bowels of the earth full steepe,
And low, where dawning day doth never peepe
His dwelling is; there Tethys his wet bed
Doth ever wash, and Cynthia still doth steepe
In silver deaw his ever-drouping hed,
Whiles sad Night over him her mantle black doth spred.
And, more to lulle him in his slumber soft,
A trickling streame from high rock tumbling downe
And ever-drizzling raine upon the loft,
Mixt with a murmuring winde, much like the sowne
Of swarming bees, did cast him in a swowne.
No other noyse, nor peoples troublous cryes,
As still are wont t' annoy the walled towne,
Might there be heard : but careless Quiet lyes,
Wrapt in eternall silence farre from enimyes." :

Observe also in a corner of this forest, a band of satyrs
dancing under the green leaves. They come leaping
like wanton kids, as gay as birds of joyous spring.
The fair Hellenore, whom they have chosen for " May-
lady," "daunst lively" also, laughing, and "with gir-
londs all bespredd." The wood re-echoes the sound of
their " merry pypes." " Their horned feet the greene
gras wore." "All day they daunced with great
lustyhedd," with sudden motions and alluring looks,
while about them their flock feed on " the brouzes " at
their pleasure.2 In every book we see strange processions
pass .by, allegorical and picturesque shows, like those

J Tlie Faerie Queene, i. c. 1, st. 39 and 41. 2 Ibid, iii c. 10, st. 43-45.

CHAP. i. THE PAGAN RENAISSANCE. 313

which were then displayed at the courts of princes;
now a masquerade of Cupid, now of the Rivers, now of
the Months, now of the Vices. Imagination was never
more prodigal or inventive. Proud Lucifera advances
in a chariot " adorned all with gold and girlonds gay,"
beaming like the dawn, surrounded by a crowd of cour-
tiers whom she dazzles with her glory and splendour :
" six unequall beasts " draw her along, and each of
these is ridden by a Vice. Idleness "upon a slouthfull
asse ... in habit blacke . . . like to an holy monck,"
sick for very laziness, lets his heavy head droop, and
holds in his hand a breviary which he does not read ;
gluttony, on " a filthie swyne," crawls by in his
deformity, "his belly . . . upblowne with luxury, and
eke with fatnesse swollen were his eyne; and like a
crane his uecke was long and fyne," drest in vine-leaves,
through which one can see his body eaten by ulcers,
and vomiting along the road the wine and flesh with
which he is glutted. Avarice seated between " two iron
coffers," " upon a camell loaden all with gold," is hand-
ling a heap of coin, with thread-bare coat, hollow cheeks,
and feet stiff with gout. Envy " upon a ravenous wolfe
still did chaw between his cankred teeth a venemous
tode, that all the poison ran about his chaw," and his
discoloured garment " ypainted full of eies," conceals a
snake wound about his body. Wrath, covered with a
torn and bloody robe, comes riding on a lion, brandish-
ing about his head "a burning brond," his eyes sparkling,
his face pale as ashes, grasping in Ins feverish hand the
haft of his dagger. The strange and terrible procession
passes on, led by the solemn harmony of the stanzas ;
and the grand music of oft repeated rhymes sustains the
imagination in this fantastic world, which, with its

314 THE RENAISSANCE. BOOK IT.

mingled horrors and splendours, has just been opened
to its flight.

Yet all this is little. However much mythology
and chivalry can supply, they do not suffice for the
needs of this poetical fancy. Spenser's characteristic
is the vastness and overflow of his picturesque invention.
Like Eubens, whatever he creates is beyond the region
of all traditions, but complete in all parts, and expresses
distinct ideas. As with Rubens, his allegory swells
its proportions beyond all rule, and withdraws fancy
from all law, except in so far as it is necessary to
harmonise forms and colours. For, if ordinary minds
receive from allegory a certain weight which oppresses
them, lofty imaginations receive from it wings which
carry them aloft. Freed by it from the common
conditions of life, they can dare all things, beyond
imitation, apart from probability, with no other guides
but their inborn energy and their shadowy instincts.
For three days Sir Guyon is led by the cursed spirit,
the tempter Mammon, in the subterranean realm, across
wonderful gardens, trees laden with golden fruits, glit-
tering palaces, and a confusion of all worldly treasures.
They have descended into the bowels of the earth, and
pass through caverns, unknown abysses, silent depths.
" An ugly Feend . . . with monstrous stalke behind
him stept," without Guyon's knowledge, ready to devour
him on the least show of covetousness. The brilliancy
of the gold lights up hideous figures, and the beaming
metal shines with a beauty more seductive in the
gloom of the infernal prison.

" That Houses forme within was rude and strong,
Lyke an huge cave hewne out of rocky cliffce,
From whose rough vaut the ragged breaches hong

CHAP. i. THE PAGAN RENAISSANCE. 315

Embost with massy gold of glorious guifte,

And with rich metall loaded every rifte,

That heavy mine they did seeme to threatt ;

And over them Arachne high did lifte

Her cunning web, and spred her subtile nett,

Enwrapped in fowle smoke and clouds more black than iett.

Both roofe, and floore, and walls, were all of gold,

But overgrowne with dust and old decay,

And hid in darknes, that none could behold

The hew thereof ; for vew of cherefull day

Did never in that House itselfe display,

But a faint shadow of uncertein light ;

Such as a lamp, whose life does fade away ;

Or as the moone, cloathed with clowdy night,

Does show to him that walkes in feare and sad affright,

In all that rowme was nothing to be seene

But huge great yron chests and coffers strong,

All bard with double bends, that none could weene

Them to enforce by violence or wrong ;

On every side they placed were along.

But all the grownd with sculs was scattered

And dead mens bones, which round about were flong ;

Whose lives, it seemed, whilome there were shed.

And their vile carcases now left unburied. . . .

Thence, forward he him ledd and shortly brought
Unto another rowme, whose dore forthright
To him did open as it had beene taught :
Therein an hundred raunges weren pight,
And hundred fournaces all burning bright ;
By every fournace many Feends did byde,
Deformed creatures, horrible in sight ;
And every Feend his busie paines applyde
To melt the golden metall, ready to be tryde.

316 THE RENAISSANCE BOOK n.

One with great bellowes gathered filling ayre,

And with forst wind the fewell did inflame ;

Another did the dying bronds repay re

With yrou tongs, and sprinckled ofte the same

With liquid waves, fiers Vulcans rage to tame,

Who, maystring them, renewd his former heat :

Some scumd the drosse that from the metall came ;

Some stird the molten owre with ladles great :

And every one did swincke, and every one did sweat . ,

He brought him, through a darksom narrow strayt,

To a broad gate all built of beaten gold :

The gate was open ; but therein did wayt

A sturdie Villein, stryding stiffe and bold,

As if the Highest God defy he would :

In his right hand an yron club he held,

But he himselfe was all of golden mould,

Yet had both life and sence, and well could weld

That cursed weapon, when his cruell foes he queld . . .

He brought him in. The rowme was large and wyde,

As it some gyeld or solemne temple weare ;

Many great golden pillours did upbeare

The massy roofe, and riches huge sustayne ;

And every pillour decked was full deare

With crownes, and diademes, and titles vaine,

Which mortall princes wore whiles they on earth did rayne

A route of people there assembled were,

Of every sort and nation under skye,

Which with great uprore preaced to draw nere

To th' upper part, where was advaunced hye

A stately siege of soveraine maiestye ;

And thereon satt a Woman gorgeous gay,

And richly cladd in robes of royaltye,

That never earthly prince in such aray

His glory did enhaunce, and pompous pryde display . , .

CHAP. i. THE PAGAN RENAISSANCE. 317

There, as in glistring glory she did sitt,
She held a great gold chaine ylincked well,
Whose upper end to highest heven was knitt,
And lower part did reach to lowest hell." l

No artist's dream matches these visions : the glow of
the furnaces beneath the vaults of the cavern, the lights
flickering over the crowded figures, the throne, and the
strange glitter of the gold shining in every direction
through the darkness. The allegory assumes gigantic
proportions. When the object is to show temperance
struggling with temptations, Spenser deems it necessary
to mass all the temptations together. He is treating
of a general virtue ; and as such a virtue is capable of
every sort of resistance, he requires from it every sort
of resistance alike ; — after the test of gold, that of
pleasure. Thus the grandest and the most exquisite
spectacles follow aud are contrasted with each other, and
all are supernatural ; the graceful and the terrible are
side by side, — the happy gardens close by with the
cursed subterranean cavern.

" No gate, but like one, being goodly dight
With bowes and braunches, which did broad dilate
Their clasping armes in wanton wreathings intricate :

So fashioned a porch with rare device,

Archt over head with an embracing vine,

Whose bounches hanging downe seemed to entice

All passers-by to taste their lushious wine,

And did themselves into their hands incline,

As freely offering to be gathered ;

Some deepe empurpled as the hyacine,

Some as the rubiue laughing sweetely red,

Some like faire erueraudes, not yet well ripened. , , .

1 The Fagrie Queene, ii. c. 7, st 28-46.

318 THE RENAISSANCE. BOOK

And in the midst of all a fountaine stood,

Of richest substance that on earth might bee,

So pure and shiny that the silver flood

Through every channell running one might see ;

Most goodly it with curious ymageree

Was over-wrought, and shapes of naked boyes,

Of which some seemed with lively iollitee

To fly about, playing their wanton toyes,

Whylest others did themselves embay in liquid ioyes.

And over all of purest gold was spred

A trayle of yvie in his native hew ;

For the rich metall was so coloured,

That wight, who did not well avis'd it vew,

Would surely deeme it to bee yvie trew ;

Low his lascivious armes adown did creepe,

That themselves dipping in the silver dew

Their fleecy flowres they fearfully did steepe,

Which drops of christall seemd for wantones to weep.

Infinit streames continually did well
Out of this fountaine, sweet and faire to see,
The which into an ample laver fell,
And shortly grew to so great quantitie,
That like a little lake it seemd to bee ;
Whose depth exceeded not three cubits hight,
That through the waves one might the bottom see,
. All pav'd beneath with jaspar shining bright,

That seeind the fountaine in that sea did sayle upright. .

The ioyous birdes, shrouded in chearefull shade,
Their notes unto the voice attempred sweet ;
Th' angelicall soft trembling voyces made
To th' instruments divine respondence meet ;
The silver-sounding instruments did meet
With the base murmur of the waters fall ;
The waters fall with difference discreet.

CHAP. L THE PAGAN RENAISSANCE. 319

Now soft, now loud, uiito the wind did call ;

The geiitle warbling wind low answered to all. . . .

Upon a bed of roses she was layd,

As faint through heat, or dight to pleasant sin ;

And was arayd, or rather disarayd,

All in a vele of silke and silver thin,

That hid no whit her alabaster skin,

But rather shewd more white, if more might bee :

More subtile web Arachne cannot spin ;

Nor the fine nets, which oft we woven see

Of scorched deaw, do not in th' ayre more lightly flee.

Her snowy brest wa,s bare to ready spoyle

Of hungry eies, which n' ote therewith be fild ;

And yet, through languour of her late sweet toyle,

Few drops, more cleare then nectar, forth distild,

That like pure orient perles adowne it trild ;

And her faire eyes, sweet smyling in delight,

Moystened their fierie beames, with which she thrild

Fraile harts, yet quenched not, like starry lights

Which sparckling on the silent waves, does seeme more bright." 1

Do we find here nothing but fairy land ? Yes ;
here are finished pictures true and complete, composed
with a painter's feeling, with choice of tints and out-
lines ; our eyes are delighted by them. This reclining
Acrasia has the pose of a goddess, or of one of Titian's
courtesans. An Italian artist might copy these gardens,
these flowing waters, these sculptured loves, those
wreaths of creeping ivy thick with glossy leaves and
fleecy flowers. Just before, in the infernal depths,
the lights, with their long streaming rays, were fine,
half-smothered by the darkness ; the lofty throne in the
vast hall, between the pillars, in the midst of a swarin-

1 The Faerie Queene, ii. c. 12, at. 53-78.

320 THE RENAISSANCE BOOK 11.

ing multitude, connected all the forms around it by draw-
ing all looks towards one centre. The poet, here and
throughout, is a colourist and an architect. However
fantastic his world may be, it is not factitious; if it
does not exist, it might have been ; indeed, it should
have been ; it is the fault of circumstances if they do
not so group themselves as to bring it to pass ; taken by
itself, it possesses that internal harmony by which a
real thing, even a still higher harmony, exists, inasmuch
as, without any regard to real things, it is altogether, and
in its least detail, constructed with a view to beauty.
Art has made its appearance : this is the great charac-
teristic of the age, which distinguishes the Faerie Queene
from all similar tales heaped up by the middle-age.
Incoherent, mutilated, they lie like rubbish, or rough-
hewn stones, which the weak hands of "the trouveres
could not build into a monument. At last the poets
and artists appear, and with them the conception of
beauty, to wit, the idea of general effect. They under-
stand proportions, relations, contrasts ; they compose.
In their hands the blurred vague sketch becomes denned,
complete, separate ; it assumes colour — is made a
picture. Every object thus conceived and imaged ac-
quires a definite existence as soon as it assumes a true
form ; centuries after, it will be acknowledged and ad-
mired, and men will be touched by it ; and more, they
will be touched by its author; for, besides the object
which he paints, the poet paints himself. His ruling
idea is stamped upon the work which it produces and
controls. Spenser is superior to his subject, compre-
hends it fully, frames it with a view to its end, in order
to impress upon it the proper mark of his soul and his
genius. Each story is modulated with respect to another,

CHAP. i. THE PAGAN RENAISSANCE. 321

and all with respect to a certain effect which is being
worked out. Thus a beauty issues from this harmony,
— the beauty in the poet's heart, — which his whole
work strives to express ; a noble and yet a cheerful
beauty, made up of moral elevation and sensuous se-
ductions, English in sentiment, Italian in externals,
chivalric in subject, modern in its perfection, representing
a unique and wonderful epoch, the appearance of pagan-
ism in a Christian race, and the worship of form by an
imagination of the North.

§ 3. PROSE.

I.

Such an epoch can scarcely last, and the poetic
vitality wears itself out by its very efflorescence, so
that its expansion leads to its decline. From the be-
ginning of the seventeenth century, the subsidence of
manners and genius grows apparent. Enthusiasm and
respect decline. The minions and court-fops intrigue
and pilfer, amid pedantry, puerility, and show. The
court plunders, and the nation murmurs. The Commons
begin to show a stern front, and the king, scolding them
like a schoolmaster, gives way before them like a little
boy. This sorry monarch (James I.) suffers himself to
be bullied by his favourites, writes to them like a gossip,
calls himself a Solomon, airs his literary vanity, and in
granting an audience to a courtier, recommends him to
become a scholar, and expects to be complimented on
his own scholarly attainments. The dignity of the
government is weakened, and the people's loyalty is
cooled. Eoyalty declines, and revolution is fostered.
At the same time, the noble chivalric paganism degen-

VOL. i. Y

322 THE RENAISSANCE. BOOK 11.

crates into a base and coarse sensuality. The king, we
are told, on one occasion, had got so drunk with his
royal brother Christian of Denmark, that they both
had to be carried to bed. Sir John Harrington
says :

" The ladies abandon their sobriety, and are seen to roll about
in intoxication. . . . The Lady who did play the Queen's part
(in the Masque of the Queen of Sheba) did carry most precious gifts
to both their Majesties ; but, forgetting the steppes arising to
the canopy, overset her caskets into his Danish Majesties lap,
and fell at his feet, tho I rather think it was in his face. Much
was the hurry and confusion ; cloths and napkins were at hand,
to make all clean. His Majesty then got up and would dance
with the Queen of Sheba; but he fell down and humbled
himself before her, and was carried to an inner chamber and
laid on a bed of state ; which was not a little defiled with the
piesents of the Queen which had been bestowed on his garments ;
such as wine, cream, jelly, beverage, cakes, spices, and other
good matters. The entertainment and show went forward, and
most of the presenters went backward, or fell down ; wine did
so occupy their upper chambers. Now did appear, in rich dress,
Hope, Faith, and Charity : Hope did assay to speak, but wine
rendered her endeavours so feeble that she withdrew, and hoped
the king would excuse her brevity : Faith . . . left the court
in a staggering condition. . . . They were both sick and spewing
in the lower hall. Next came Victory, who . . . by a strange
medley of versification . . . and after much lamentable utterance
was led away like a silly captive, and laid to sleep in the outer
steps of the anti-chamber. As for Peace, she most rudely made
war with her olive branch, and laid on the pates of those who
did oppose her coming. I ne'er did see such lack of good order,
discretion, and sobriety in our Queen's days." 1

Observe that these tipsy women were great ladies.

1 Nugfe Antiquce, i 349 et passim.

CHAP. i. THE PAGAN RENAISSANCE. 323

The reason is, that the grand ideas which introduce an
epoch, end, in their exhaustion, by preserving nothing
but their vices ; the proud sentiment of natural life be-
comes a vulgar appeal to the senses. An entrance, an
arch of triumph under James I., often represented
obscenities ; and later, when the sensual instincts, exas-
perated by Puritan tyranny, begin to raise their heads
once more, we shall find under the Eestoration excess
revelling in its low vices, and triumphing in its shame-
lessness.

Meanwhile literature undergoes a change ; the power-
ful breeze which had wafted it on, and which, amidst
singularity, refinements, exaggerations, had made it
great, slackened and diminished. With Carew, Suckling,
and Herrick, prettiness takes the place of the beautiful.
That which strikes them is no longer the general features
of things ; and they no longer try to express the inner
character of what they describe. They no longer possess
that liberal conception, that instinctive penetration, by
which we sympathise with objects, and grow capable of
creating them anew. They no longer boast of that over-
flow of emotions, that excess of ideas and images, which
compelled a man to relieve himself by words, to act
externally, to represent freely and boldly the interior
drama which made his whole body and heart tremble.
They are rather wits of the court, cavaliers of fashion,
who wish to show off their imagination and style. In
their hands love becomes gallantry ; they write songs,
fugitive pieces, compliments to the ladies. There are
no more upwellings from the heart. They write elo-
quent phrases in order to be applauded, and flattering
exaggerations in order to please. The divine faces, the
serious or profound looks, the virgin or impassioned

324 THE RENAISSANCE. BOOK n.

expressions which burst forth at every step in the early
poets, have disappeared ; here we see nothing but agree-
able countenances, painted in agreeable verses. Black-
guardism is not far off; we meet with it already in
Suckling, and crudity to boot, and prosaic epicurism ;
their sentiment is expressed before long, in such a phrase
as : " Let us amuse ourselves, and a fig for the rest,"
The only objects they can still paint, are little graceful
things, a kiss, a May^day festivity, a dewy primrose, a daf-
fodil, a marriage morning, a bee.1 Herrick and Suckling

1 " Some asked me where the Rubies grew,

And nothing I did say ;
But with my finger pointed to

The lips of Julia.
Some ask'd how Pearls did grow, and where ;

Then spake I to my girle,
To part her lips, and shew me there

The quarelets of Pearl.
One ask'd me where the roses grew ;

I bade him not go seek ;
But forthwith bade my Julia show
A bud in either cheek."

HERRICK'S Hesperides, ed. Walford, 1859 ;
The Rock of Rubies, p. 32.

" About the sweet bag of a bee,

Two Cupids fell at odds ;
And whose the pretty prize shu'd be,

They vow'd to ask the Gods.
Which Venus hearing, thither came,

And for their boldness stript them ;
And taking thence from each his flame,

With rods of mirtle whipt them.
Which done, to still their wanton cries,

When quiet grown sh'ad seen them,
She kist and wip'd their dove-like eyes,

And gave the bag between them."

HERRICK, IMi .- The Bag of the Bet, p. 41.

ROBERT HERR1CK.

CHAP. i. THE PAGAN RENAISSANCE. 325

especially produce little exquisite poems, delicate, ever
pleasant or agreeable, like those attributed to Anacreon,
or those which abound in the Anthology. In fact, here,
as at the Grecian period alluded to, we are in the decline
of paganism ; energy departs, the reign of the agreeable
begins. People do not relinquish the worship of
beauty and pleasure, but dally with them. They deck
and fit them to their taste ; they cease to subdue and
bend men, who enjoy them whilst they amuse them.
It is the last beam of a setting sun ; the genuine poetic

" Why so pale and wan, fond lover ?

Pr'ythee, why so pale ?
Will, when looking well can't move her,

Looking ill prevail ?

Pr'ythee, why so pale ?
Why so dull and mute, young sinner ?

Pr'ythee, why so mute ?
Will, when speaking well can't win her,

Saying nothing do't ?

Pr'ythee, why so mute ?
Quit, quit for shame : this will not move,

This cannot take her ;
If of herself she will not love,

Nothing can make her.

The devil take her ! "

Sir JOHN SUCKLING'S - Works, ed. A. Suckling,
1836, p. 70.

" As when a lady, walking Flora's bower,
Picks here a pink, and there a gilly-llower,
Now plucks a violet from her purple bed,
And then a primrose, the year's maidenhead,
There nips the brier, here the lover's pansy,
Shifting her dainty pleasures with her fancy,
This on her arms, and that she lists to wear
Upon the borders of her curious hair ;
At length a rose-bud (passing all the rest)
She plucks, and bosoms in her lily breast.

QUARLES. Stanzas.

326 THE RENAISSANCE. BOOK n.

sentiment dies out with Sedley, Waller, and the rhyme-
sters of the Eestoration; they write prose in verse;
their heart is on a level with their style, and with an
exact language we find the commencement of a new age
and a new art.

Side by side with prettiness comes affectation ; it is
the second mark of the decadence. Instead of writing to
express things, they write to say them well ; they outbid
their neighbours, and strain every mode of speech ; they
push art over on the side to which it had a leaning ;
and as in this age it had a leaning towards vehemence
and imagination, they pile up their emphasis and
colouring. A jargon always springs out of a style. In
all arts, the first masters, the inventors, discover the
idea, steep themselves in it, and leave it to effect its
outward form. Then come the second class, the imita-
tors, who sedulously repeat this form, and alter it by
exaggeration. Some nevertheless have talent, as Quarles,
Herbert, Habington, Donne in particular, a pungent
satirist, of terrible crudeness,1 a powerful poet, of a pre-
cise and intense imagination, who still preserves some-
thing of the energy and thrill of the original inspiration.2

1 See, in particular, his satire against courtiers. The following is
against imitators.

" But he is worst, who (beggarly) doth chaw
Others wit's fruits, and in his ravenous maw
Kankly digested, doth those things out-spew,
As his owne things ; and they 're his owne, 't is true,
For if one eate my meate, though it be known e
The meat was mine, th' excrement is his owne."

DONNE'S Satires, 1639. Satire ii. p. 128.

9 " When I behold a stream, which from the spring
Doth with doubtful melodious murmuring,
Or in a speechless slumber calmly ride
Her wedded channel's bosom, and there chide

CHAP. i. THE PAGAN KENAISSANCE. 327

But he deliberately spoils all these gifts, and succeeds
with great difficulty in concocting a piece of nonsense.
For instance, the impassioned poets had said to their
mistress, that if they lost her, they should hate all other
women. Donne, in order to eclipse them, says :

" 0 do not die, for I shall hate
All women so, when thou art gone,
That thee I shall not celebrate
When I remember thou wast one." 1

Twenty times while reading him we rub our brow, and
ask with astonishment, how a man could have so tor-
mented and contorted himself, strained his style, refined
on his refinement, hit upon such absurd comparisons ?
But this was the spirit of the age ; they made an effort
to be ingeniously absurd. A flea had bitten Donne and
his mistress, and he says :

" This flea is you and I, and this
Our manage bed and mariage temple is.
Though Parents grudge, and you, w' are met,
And cloyster'd in these living walls of Jet.
Though use make you apt to kill me,
Let not to that selfe-murder added be,
And sacrilege, three sins in killing three." 2

And bend her brows, and swell, if any bough

Does but stoop down to kiss her utmost brow ;

Yet if her often gnawing kisses win

The traiterous banks to gape and let her in,

She rusheth violently and doth divorce

Her from her native and her long kept-course,

And roares, and braves it, and in gallant scorn

In flatt'ring eddies promising return,

She flouts her channel, which thenceforth is dry,

Then say I : That is she, and this am I." — DONNE, Elegy vi.

1 Poems, 1639 : A Feaver, p. 15. 2 Ibid. The Flea, p. 1.

328 THE RENAISSANCE. BOOK n,

The Marquis de Mascarille1 never found anything to
equal this. Would you have believed a writer could
invent such absurdities ? She and he made but one,
for both are but one with the flea, and so one could not
be killed without the other. Observe that the wise
Malherbe wrote very similar enormities, in the Tears
of St. Peter, and that the sonneteers of Italy and Spain
reach simultaneously the same height of folly, and you
will agree that throughout Europe at that time they were
at the close of a poetical epoch.

On this boundary line of a closing and a dawning
literature a poet appeared, one of the most approved and
illustrious of his time, Abraham Cowley,2 a precocious
child, a reader and a versifier like Pope, and who, like
Pope, having known passions less than books, busied
himself less about things than about words. Literary
exhaustion has seldom been more manifest. He pos-
sesses all the capacity to say whatever pleases him, but
he has precisely nothing to say. The substance has
vanished, leaving in its place an empty form. In vain
he tries the epic, the Pindaric strophe, all kinds of
stanzas, odes, short lines, long lines ; in vain he calls to
his assistance botanical and philosophical similes, all the
erudition of the university, all the recollections of anti-
quity, all the ideas of new science : we yawn as we
read him. Except in a few descriptive verses, tw^o or
three graceful tendernesses,3 he feels nothing, he speaks
only ; he is a poet of the brain. His collection of

1 A valet in Moliere's Les Pricieuses Ridicules, who apes and exagge-
rates his master's manners and style, and pretends to be a marquess.
He also appears in L'Etourdi and Le dfpit Amoureux, by the same
author. — TR,

2 1608-1667. I refer to the eleventh edition of 1710.

3 The Spring (The Mistress, i 72).

CHAT. i. THE PAGAN RENAISSANCE. 329

amorous pieces is but a vehicle for a scientific test, and
serves to show that he has read the authors, that lie
knows geography, that he is well versed in anatomy,
that he has a smattering of medicine and astronomy, that
he has at his service comparisons and allusions enough
to rack the brains of his readers. He will speak in this
wise :

" Beauty, thou active — passive 111 !
Which dy'st thyself as fast as thou. dost kill ! "

or will remark that his mistress is to blame for
spending three hours every morning at her toilet,
because

" They make that Beauty Tyranny,
That's else a Civil-government."

After reading two hundred pages, you feel disposed to
box his ears. You have to think, by way of consolation,
that every grand age must draw to a close, that this one
could not do so otherwise, that the old glow of enthu-
siasm, the sudden flood of rapture, images, whimsical
and audacious fancies, which once rolled through the
minds of men, arrested now and cooled down, could only
exhibit dross, a curdling scum, a multitude of brilliant
and offensive points. You say to yourself that, after
all, Cowley had perhaps talent ; you find that he had in
fact one, a new talent, unknown to the old masters, the
sign of a new culture, which needs other manners, and
announces a new society. Cowley had these manners,
and belongs to this society. He was a well- governed,
reasonable, well-informed, polished, well-educated man,
who after twelve years of service and writing in France,
under Queen Henrietta, retires at last wisely into the
country, where he studies natural history, and prepares

330 THE RENAISSANCE. BOOK n

a treatise on religion, philosophising on men and life,
fertile in general reflections and ideas, a moralist, bidding
his executor " to let nothing stand in his writings which
might seem the least in the world to be an offence
against religion or good manners." Such intentions and
such a life produce and indicate less a poet, that is, a
seer, a creator, than a literary man, I mean a man who
can think and speak, and who therefore ought to have
read much, learned much, written much, ought to pos-
sess a calm and clear mind, to be accustomed to polite
society, sustained conversation, pleasantry. In fact,
Cowley is an author by profession, the oldest of those,
who in England deserve the name. His prose is as
easy and sensible as his poetry is contorted and unreason-
able. A polished man, writing for polished men, pretty
much as he would speak to them in a drawing-room, —
this I take to be the idea which they had of a good
author in the seventeenth century. It is the idea which
Cowley's Essays leave of his character ; it is the kind
of talent which the writers of the coming age take for
their model ; and he is the first of that grave and ami-
able group which, continued in Temple, reaches so far
as to include Addison.

II.

Having reached this point, the Eenaissance seemed
to have attained its limit, and, like a drooping and faded
flower, to be ready to leave its place for a new bud which
began to spring up amongst its withered leaves. At all
events, a living and unexpected shoot sprang from the
old declining stock. At the moment when art lan-
guished, science shot forth ; the whole labour of the age
ended in this. The fruits are not unlike ; on the con-

CHAP. i. THE PAGAN KENAISSANCE. 331

trary, they come from the same sap, and by the diversity
of the shape only manifest two distinct periods of the
inner growth which has produced them. Every art
ends in a science, and all poetry in a philosophy. For
science and philosophy do but translate into precise
formulas the original conceptions which art and poetry
render sensible by imaginary figures : when once the
idea of an epoch is manifested in verse by ideal crea-
tions, it naturally comes to be expressed in prose by
positive arguments. That which had struck men on
escaping from ecclesiastical oppression and monkish as-
ceticism was the pagan idea of a life true to nature, and
freely developed. They had found nature buried behind
scholasticism, and they had expressed it in poems and
paintings ; in Italy by superb healthy corporeality, in
England by vehement and unconventional spirituality,
with such divination of its laws, instincts, and forms,
that we might extract from their theatre and their pic-
tures a complete theory of soul and body. When
enthusiasm is past, curiosity begins. The sentiment of
beauty gives way to the need of truth. The theory
contained in works of imagination frees itself. The
gaze continues fixed on nature, not to admire now, but
to understand. From painting we pass to anatomy,
from the drama to moral philosophy, from grand poetical
divinations to great scientific views ; the second continue
the first, and the same mind displays itself in both ;
for what art had represented, and science proceeds to
observe, are living things, with their complex and com-
plete structure, set in motion by their internal forces,
with no supernatural intervention. Artists and savants,
all set out, without knowing it themselves, from the
same master conception, to wit, that nature subsists of

332 THE RENAISSANCE. BOOK n.

herself, that every existence has in its own womb the
source of its action, that the causes of events are the
innate laws of things ; an all-powerful idea, from which
was to issue the modern civilisation, and which, at the
time I write of, produced in England and Italy, as be-
fore in Greece, genuine sciences, side by side with a
complete art: after da Vinci and Michel Angelo, the
school of anatomists, mathematicians, naturalists, ending
with Galileo; after Spenser, Ben Jonson, and Shaks-
peare, the school of thinkers who surround Bacon and
lead up to Harvey.

We have not far to look for this school. In the
interregnum of Christianity the dominating bent of
mind belongs to it. It was paganism which reigned
in Elizabeth's court, not only in letters, but in doctrine,
— a paganism of the north, always serious, generally
sombre, but which was based, like that of the south, on
natural forces. In some men all Christianity had passed
away ; many proceeded to atheism through excess of
rebellion and debauchery, like Marlowe and Greene.
With others, like Shakspeare, the idea of God scarcely
makes its appearance ; they see in our poor short human
life only a dream, and beyond it the long sad sleep :
for them, death is the goal of life; at most a dark
gulf, into which man plunges, uncertain of the issue.
If they carry their gaze beyond, they perceive,1 not
the spiritual soul welcomed into a purer world, but the
corpse abandoned to the damp earth, or the ghost hover-
ing about the churchyard. They speak like sceptics or
superstitious men, never as true believers. Their heroes

1 See in Shakspeare, The Tempest, Measure for Measure, Hamlet : in
Beaumont and Fletcher, Thierry and Theodoret, Act iv. ; Webster,
passim.

CHAP. i. THE PAGAN RENAISSANCE. 333

have human, not religious virtues ; against crime they
rely on honour and the love of the beautiful, not on
piety and the fear of God. If others, at intervals, like
Sidney and Spenser, catch a glimpse of the Divine, it
is as a vague ideal light, a sublime Platonic phantom,
which has no resemblance to a personal God, a strict
inquisitor of the slightest motions of the heart. He
appears at the summit of things, like the splendid
crown of the world, but He does not weigh upon human
life; He leaves it intact and free, only turning it
towards the beautiful. Man does not know as yet the
sort of narrow prison in which official cant and respect-
able creeds were, later on, to confine activity and in-
telligence. Even the believers, sincere Christians like
Bacon and Sir Thomas Browne, discard all oppressive
sternness, reduce Christianity to a sort of moral poetry,
and allow naturalism to subsist beneath religion. In such
a broad and open channel, speculation could spread its
wings. With Lord Herbert appeared a systematic
deism ; with Milton and Algernon Sidney, a philo-
sophical religion ; Clarendon went so far as to compare
Lord Falkland's gardens to the groves of Academe.
Against the rigorism of the Puritans, Chillingwo&h,
Hales, Hooker, the greatest doctors of the English
Church, give a large place to natural reason, — so large,
that never, even to this day, has it made such an
advance.

An astonishing irruption of facts — the discovery of
America, the revival of antiquity, the restoration of
philology, the invention of the arts, the development of
industries, the march of human curiosity over the whole
of the past and the whole of the globe — came to furnish
subject-matter, and prose began its reign. Sidney

334 THE RENAISSANCE. BOOK n.

Wilson, Ascham, and Puttenham explored the rules oi
style ; Hackluyt and Purchas compiled the cyclopaedia
of travel and the description of every land ; Holinshed,
Speed, Raleigh, Stowe, Knolles, Daniel, Thomas May,
Lord Herbert, founded history ; Camden, Spelman,
Cotton, Usher, and Selden inaugurate scholarship; a
legion of patient workers, of obscure collectors, of literary
pioneers, amassed, arranged, and sifted the documents
which Sir Robert Cotton and Sir Thomas Bodley stored
up in their libraries ; whilst Utopians, moralists, painters
of manners — Thomas More, Joseph Hall, John Earle,
Owen Feltham, Burton — described and passed judgment
on the modes of life, continued with Fuller, Sir Thomas
Browne, and Isaac Walton up to the middle of the next
century, and add to the number of controversialists and
politicians who, with Hooker, Taylor, Chillingworth,
Algernon Sidney, Harrington, study religion, society,
church and state. A copious and confused fermenta-
tion, from which abundance of thoughts rose, but few
notable books. Noble prose, such as was heard at the
court of Louis XIV., in the house of Pollio, in the
schools at Athens, such as rhetorical and sociable nations
knpw how to produce, was altogether lacking. These
men had not the spirit of analysis, the art of following
step by step the natural order of ideas, nor the spirit of
conversation, the talent never to weary or shock others.
Their imagination is too little regulated, and their
manners too little polished. They who had mixed most
in the world, even Sidney, speak roughly what they
think, and as they think it. Instead of glossing they
exaggerate. They blurt out all, and withhold nothing.
When they do not employ excessive complimeuts, they
take to coarse jokes. They are ignorant of measured

CHAP. i. THE PAGAN RENAISSANCE. 335

liveliness, refined raillery, delicate Hattery. They re-
joice in gross puns, dirty allusions. They mistake in-
volved charades and grotesque images for wit. Though
they are great lords and ladies, they talk like ill-bred
persons, lovers of buffoonery, of shows, and bear-fights.
With some, as Overbury or Sir Thomas Browne, prose is
so much run over by poetry, that it covers its narrative
with images, and hides ideas under its pictures. They
load their style with flowery comparisons, which produce
one another, and mount one above another, so that sense
disappears, and ornament only is visible. In short,
they are generally pedants, still stiff with the rust of
the school; they divide and subdivide, propound theses,
definitions ; they argue solidly and heavily, and quote
their authors in Latin, and even in Greek ; they square
their massive periods, and learnedly knock their adver-
saries down, and their readers too, as -a natural conse-
quence. They are never on the prose-level, but always
above or below — above by their poetic genius, below
by the weight of their education and the barbarism of
their manners. But they think seriously and for them-
selves ; they are deliberate ; they are convinced and
touched by what they say. Even in the compiler we
find a force and loyalty of spirit, which give confidence
and cause pleasure. Their writings are like the power-
ful and heavy engravings of their contemporaries, the
maps of Hofnagel for instance, so harsh and so instruc-
tive ; their conception is sharp and clear ; they have
the gift of perceiving every object, not under a general
aspect, like the classical writers, but specially and
individually. It is not man in the abstract, the citizen
as he is everywhere, the countryman as such, that they
represent, but James or Thomas, Smith or Brown, of

336 THE RENAISSANCE. BOOK n

such a parish, from such an office, with such and such
attitude or dress, distinct from all others ; in short, they
see, not the idea, but the individual. Imagine the
disturbance that such a disposition produces in a man's
head, how the regular order of ideas becomes deranged
by it ; how every object, with the infinite medley of its
forms, properties, appendages, will thenceforth fasten
itself by a hundred points of contact unforeseen to
other objects, and bring before the mind a series and
a family ; what boldness language will derive from it ;
what familiar, picturesque, absurd words, will break
forth in succession; how the dash, the unforeseen, the
originality and inequality of invention, will stand out.
Imagine, at the same time, what a hold this form of
mind has on objects, how many facts it condenses in
each conception ; what a mass of personal judgments,
foreign authorities, suppositions, guesses, imaginations,
it spreads over every subject ; with what venturesome
and creative fecundity it engenders both truth and
conjecture. It is an extraordinary chaos of thoughts
and forms, often abortive, still more often barbarous,
sometimes grand. But from this superfluity something
lasting and great is produced, namely science, and we
have only to examine more closely into one or two of
these works to see the new creation emerge from the
blocks and the debris.

III.

Two writers especially display this state of mind.
The first, Eobert Burton, a clergyman and university
recluse, who passed Ins life in libraries, and dabbled in
all the sciences, as learned as Rabelais, having an
inexhaustible and overflowing memory ; unequal, inoro-

CHAP. i. THE PAGAN RENAISSANCE. 337

over, gifted with enthusiasm, and spasmodically gay,
but as a rule sad and morose, to the extent of confessing
in his epitaph that melancholy made up his life and
his death; in the first place original, liking his own
common sense, and one of the earliest models of that
singular English mood which, withdrawing man within
himself, develops in him, at one time imagination, at
another scrupulosity, at another oddity, and makes of
him, according to circumstances, a poet, an eccentric, a
humorist, a madman, or a puritan. He read on for
thirty years, put an encyclopaedia into his head, and
now, to amuse and relieve himself, takes a folio of
blank paper. Twenty lines of a poet, a dozen lines of
a treatise on agriculture, a folio page of heraldry, a
description of rare fishes, a paragraph of a sermon on
patience, the record of the fever fits of hypochondria,
the history of the particle that, a scrap of metaphysics,
— this is what passes through his brain in a quarter of
an hour : it is a carnival of ideas and phrases, Greek,
Latin, German, French, Italian, philosophical, geometri-
cal, medical, poetical, astrological, musical, pedagogic,
heaped one on the other; an enormous medley, a pro-
digious mass of jumbled quotations, jostling thoughts,
with the vivacity and the transport of a feast of un-
reason.

" This roving humour (though not with like success) I have
ever had, and, like a ranging spaniel that barks at every bird he
sees, leaving his game, I have followed all, saving that which
I should, and may justly complain, and truly, qui ubique est, nus-
guam est, which Gesner did in modesty, that I have read many
books, but to little purpose, for want of good method, I have
confusedly tumbled over divers authors in our libraries with
small profit, for want of art, order, memory, judgment. I

VOL. L z

338 THE RENAISSANCE. BOOK n.

never travelled but in map or card, in which my unconfined
thoughts have freely expatiated, as having ever been especially
delighted with the study of cosmography. Saturn was lord of
my geniture, culminating, etc., and Mars principal significator
of manners, in partile conjunction with mine ascendent ; both
fortunate in their houses, etc. I am not poor, I am not rich ;
nihil est, nihil deest ; I have little ; I want nothing : all my
treasure is in Minerva's tower. Greater preferment as I could
never get, so am I not in debt for it. I have a competency
(laus Deo) from my noble and munificent patrons. Though I
live still a collegiat student, as Democritus in his garden, and
lead a monastique life, ipse mild tkeatrum, sequestred from those
tumults and troubles of the world, et tanquam in speculd positus
(as he said), in some high place above you all, like Stoicus
sapiens, omnia scecula prceterita prcesentiaque videns, uno velut
intuitu, I hear and see what is done abroad, how others run,
ride, turmoil, and macerate themselves in court and countrey.
Far from these wrangling lawsuits, aula vanitatem, fori ambi-
tionem, ridere mecum soleo : I laugh at all, only secure, lest my
suit go amiss, my ships perish, corn and cattle miscarry, trade
decay ; I have no wife nor children, good or bad, to provide for ;
a mere spectator of other men's fortunes and adventures, and
how they act their parts, which methinks are diversely pre-
sented unto me, as from a common theatre or scene. I hear
new news every day : and those ordinary rumours of war,
plagues, fires, inundations, thefts, murders, massacres, meteors,
comets, spectrums, prodigies, apparitions ; of towns taken, cities
besieged in France, Germany, Turkey, Persia, Poland, etc., daily
musters and preparations, and such like, which these tempes-
tuous times afford, battles fought, so many men slain, mono-
machies, shipwracks, piracies, and sea-fights, peace, leagues,
stratagems, and fresh alarms — a vast confusion of vows, wishes,
actions, edicts, petitions, lawsuits, pleas, laws, proclamations,
complaints, grievances, — are daily brought to our ears: new
books every day, pamphlets, currantoes, stories, whole catalogues

CHAP. i. THE PAGAN RENAISSANCE. 339

of volumes of all sorts, new paradoxes, opinions, schisms, here-
sies, controversies in philosophy, religion, etc. Now come tid-
ings of weddings, maskings, mummeries, entertainments, jubilies,
embassies, tilts and tournaments, trophies, triumphs, revels,
sports, playes : then again, as in a new shifted scene, treasons,
cheating tricks, robberies, enormous villanies in all kinds,
funerals, burials, death of princes, new discoveries, expeditions ;
now comical, then tragical matters. To-day \ve hear of new
lords and officers created, to-morrow of some great men deposed,
and then again of fresh honours conferred : one is let loose,
another imprisoned : one purchaseth, another breaketh : he
thrives, his neighbour turns bankrupt ; now plenty, then again
dearth and famine ; one runs, another rides, wrangles, laughs,
weeps, etc. Thus I daily hear, and such like, both private and
publick news." l

" For what a world of books offers itself, in all subjects, arts,
and sciences, to the sweet content and capacity of the reader ?
In arithmetick, geometry, perspective, optick, astronomy, archi-
tecture, sculptura, pictura, of which so many and such elaborate
treatises are of late written : in mechanicks and their mysteries,
military matters, navigation, riding of horses, fencing, swim-
ming, gardening, planting, great tomes of husbandry, cookery,
faulconry, hunting, fishing, fowling, etc., with exquisite pictures
of all sports, games, and what not. In musick. metaphysicks,
natural and moral philosophy, philologie, in policy, heraldry,
genealogy, chronology, etc., they afford great tomes, or those
studies of antiquity, etc., et quid subtilius arithmetics inventioni-
bus ? quid jucundius musicis rationibus ? quid divinius astronomi-
cis ? quid rectius geometricis demonstrationibus ? What so sure,
what so pleasant ? He that shall but see the geometrical tower
of Garezenda at Bologne in Italy, the steeple and clock at Stras-
borough, will admire the effects of art, or that engine of Archi-
medes to remove the earth itself, if he had but a place to fasten

1 Anatomy of Melancholy, 12th ed. 1821, 2 vols. : Democritus to
the Reader, i 4.

340 THE RENAISSANCE. BOOK n.

his instrument. Archimedis cochlea, and rare devises to corrivate
waters, musick instruments, and trisyllable echoes again, again,
and again repeated, with miriades of such. What vast tomes
are extant in law, physick, and divinity, for profit, pleasure,
practice, speculation, in verse or prose, etc. ! Their names alone
are the subject of whole volumes ; we have thousands of authors
of all sorts, many great libraries, full well furnished, like so
many dishes of meat, served out for several palates, and he is a
very block that is affected with none of them. Some take an
infinite delight to study the very languages wherein these books
are written — Hebrew, Greek, Syriack, Chalde, Arabick, etc.
Methinks it would well please any man to look upon a geographi-
cal map (suavi animum delectatione allicere, ob incredibilem rerum
varietatem et jucunditatem, et ad pleniorem sui cognitionem excitare),
chorographical, topographical delineations ; to behold, as it were,
all the remote provinces, towns, cities of the world, and never
to go forth of the limits of his study ; to measure, by the scale
and compasse, their extent, distance, examine their site.
Charles the Great (as Platina writes) had three faire silver
tables, in one of which superficies was a large map of Con-
stantinople, in the second Rome neatly engraved, in the third
an exquisite description of the whole world ; and much delight
he took in them. What greater pleasure can there now be,
than to view those elaborate maps of Ortelius, Mercator, Hon
dius, etc. ? to peruse those books of cities put out by Braunus
and Hogenbergius ? to read those exquisite descriptions of
Maginus, Munster, Herrera, Laet, Merula, Boterus, Leander
Albertus, Camden, Leo Afer, Adricomius, Nic. Gerbelius, etc. 1
those famous expeditions of Christopher Columbus, Americus
Vespucius, Marcus Polus the Venetian, Lod. Vertomannus,
Aloysius Cadamustus, etc. 1 those accurate diaries of Portugals,
Hollanders, of Bartison, Oliver a Nort, etc., Hacluit's Voyages,
Pet. Martyr's Decades, Benzo, Lerius, Linschoten's relations,
those Hodaeporicons of Jod. a Meggen, Brocarde the Monke,
Bredenbachius, Jo. Dublinius, Sands, etc., to Jerusalem, Egypt,

OHAP. i. THE PAGAN RENAISSANCE. 341

and other remote places of the world 1 those pleasaut itineraries
of Paulus Hentzerus, Jodocus Sincerus, Dux Pojouus, etc. 1 to
read Bellonius observations, P. Gillius his survayes ; those parts
of America, set out, and curiously cut in pictures, by Fratres a
Bry ? To see a well cut herbal, hearbs, trees, flowers, plants,
all vegetals, expressed in their proper colours to the life, as that
of Matthiolus upon Dioscorides, Delacampius, Lobel, Bauhinus.
and that last voluminous and mighty herbal of Besler of Nor-
emberge ; wherein almost every plant is to his own biguesse.
To see birds, beasts, and fishes of the sea, spiders, gnats,
serpents, flies, etc., all creatures set out by the same art, and
truly expressed in lively colours, with an exact description of
their natures, vertues, qualities, etc., as hath been accurately
performed by ^Elian, Gesner, Ulysses Aldrovandus, Bellonius,
Rondoletius, Hippolytus Salvianus, etc." l

He is never-ending; words, phrases, overflow, are
heaped up, overlap each other, and flow on, carrying
the reader along, deafened, stunned, half-drowned,
unable to touch ground in the deluge. Burton is
inexhaustible. There are no ideas which he does not
iterate under fifty forms : when he has exhausted his
own, he pours out upon us other men's — the classics,
the rarest authors, known only by savants — authors
rarer still, known only to the learned ; he borrows from
all "Underneath these deep caverns of erudition and
science, there is one blacker and more unknown than
all the others, filled with forgotten authors, with crack-
jaw names, Besler of Nuremberg, Adricomius, Linschoten,
Brocarde, Bredenbachius. Amidst all these antediluvian
monsters, bristling with Latin terminations, he is at
his ease ; he sports with them, laughs, skips from one
to the other, drives them all abreast. He is like old

1 Anatomy of Melancholy, L part 2, sec. 2, Mem. 4, p. 420, et passim.

342 THE RENAISSANCE. BOOK n

Proteus, the sturdy rover, who in one hour, with his
team of hippopotami, makes the circuit of the ocean.

What subject does he take ? Melancholy, his own
individual mood ; and he takes it like a schoolman.
None of St. Thomas Aquinas' treatises is more regularly
constructed than his. This torrent of erudition flows in
geometrically planned channels, turning off at right
angles without deviating by a line. At the head of
every part you will find a synoptical and analytical table,
with hyphens, brackets, each division begetting its
subdivisions, each subdivision its sections, each section
its subsections : of the malady in general, of melan-
choly in particular, of its nature, its seat, its varieties,
causes, symptoms, prognosis ; of its cure by permissible
means, by forbidden means, by dietetic means, by
pharmaceutical means. After the scholastic process,
he descends from the general to the particular, and
disposes each emotion and idea in its labelled case.
In this framework, supplied by the middle-age, he
heaps up the whole, like a man of the Kenaissance, —
the literary description of passions and the medical
description of madness, details of the hospital with a
satire on human follies, physiological treatises side by
side with personal confidences, the recipes of the apothe-
cary with moral counsels, remarks on love with the
history of evacuations. The discrimination of ideas
has not yet been effected; doctor and poet, man of
letters and savant, he is all at once; for want of dams,
ideas pour like different liquids into the same vat, with
strange spluttering and bubbling, with an unsavoury
smell and odd effect. But the vat is full, and from
this admixture are produced potent compounds which
no preceding age has known.

CHAP. i. THE PAGAN RENAISSANCE. 343

IV.

For in this mixture there is an effectual leaven, the
poetic sentiment, which stirs up and animates the vast
erudition, which will not be confined to dry catalogues ;
which, interpreting every fact, every object, disentangles
or divines a mysterious soul within it, and agitates the
whole mind of man, by representing to him the restless
world within and without him as a grand enigma.
Let us conceive a kindred mind to Shakspeare's, a
scholar and an observer instead of an actor and a poet,
who in place of creating is occupied in comprehending,
but who, like Shakspeare, applies himself to living things,
penetrates their internal structure, puts himself in com-
munication with their actual laws, imprints in himself
fervently and scrupulously the smallest details of their
outward appearance ; who at the same time extends his
penetrating surmises beyond the region of observation,
discerns behind visible phenomena some world obscure
yet sublime, and trembles with a kind of veneration
before the vast, indistinct, but peopled darkness on
whose surface our little universe hangs quivering.
Such a one is Sir Thomas Browne, a naturalist, a philo-
sopher, a scholar, a physician, and a moralist, almost
the last of the generation which produced Jeremy Taylor
and Shakspeare. No thinker bears stronger witness to
the wandering and inventive curiosity of the age. No
writer has better displayed the brilliant and sombre
imagination of the North. No one has spoken with a
more eloquent emotion of death, the vast night of
forgetfulness, of the all-devouring pit, of human vanity,
which tries to create an ephemeral immortality out of
glory or sculptured stones. No one has revealed, in

344 THE RENAISSANCE. BOOK n.

more glowing and original expressions, the poetic sap
which flows through all the minds of the age.

" But the iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy,
and deals with the memory of men without distinction to merit
of perpetuity. Who can but pity the founder of the pyramids 1
Herostratus lives that burnt the temple of Diana, he is almost
lost that built it. Time hath spared the epitaph of Adrian's
horse, confounded that of himself. In vain we compute our
felicities by the advantage of our good names, since bad have
equal duration ; and Thersites is like to live as long as Agamem-
non. Who knows whether the best of men be known, or whether
there be not more remarkable persons forgot than any that stand
remembered in the known account of time ? Without the favour
of the everlasting register, the first man had been as unknown
as the last, and Methuselah's long life had been his only
chronicle.

" Oblivion is not to be hired. The greater part must be con-
tent to be as though they had not been, to be found in the
register of God, not in the record of man. Twenty-seven names
make up the first story before the flood, and the recorded names
ever since contain not one living century. The number of the
dead long exceedeth all that shall live. The night of time far
surpasseth the day, and who knows when was the equinox?
Every hour adds unto the current arithmetick which scarce
stands one moment. And since death must be the Lucina of
life, and even Pagans could doubt, whether thus to live were to
die ; since our longest sun sets at right declensions, and makes
but winter arches, and therefore it cannot be long before we lie
down in darkness, and have our light in ashes • since the brother
of death daily haunts us with dying mementos, and time, that
grows old in itself, bids us hope no long duration ; — diuturnity
is a dream, and folly of expectation.

" Darkness and light divide the course of time, and oblivion
shares with memory a great part even of our living beings ; we
slightly remember our felicities, and the smartest strokes of

SIR THOMAS BROWNE.

CHAP. i. THE PAGAN" RENAISSANCE. 345

affliction leave but short smart upon us. Sense endureth no
extremities, and sorrows destroy us or themselves. To weep
into stones are fables. Afflictions induce callosities; miseries
are slippery, or fall like snow upon us, which notwithstanding
is no unhappy stupidity. To be ignorant of evils to come, and
forgetful of evils past, is a merciful provision of nature, whereby
we digest the mixture of our few and evil days ; and our delivered
senses not relapsing into cutting remembrances, our sorrows are
not kept raw by the edge of repetitions. . . . All was vanity,
feeding the wind, and folly. The Egyptian mummies, which
Cambyses or time hath spared, avarice now consumeth. Mummy
is become merchandise, Mizraim cures wounds, and Pharaoh is
sold for balsams. . . . Man is a noble animal, splendid in ashes,
and pompous in the grave, solemnizing nativities and deaths with
equal lustre, nor omitting ceremonies of bravery in the infancy
of his nature . . . Pyramids, arches, obelisks, were but the
irregularities of vain glory, and wild enormities of ancient
magnanimity."1

These are almost the words of a poet, and it is
just this poet's imagination which urges him onward
into science.2 Face to face with the productions of
nature he abounds in conjectures, comparisons ; he
gropes about, proposing explanations, making trials,
extending his guesses like so many flexible and vibrating
feelers into the four corners of the globe, into the most
distant regions of fancy and truth. As he looks upon
the tree-like and foliaceous crusts which are formed
upon the surface of freezing liquids, he asks himself if
this be not a regeneration of vegetable essences, dis-
solved in the liquid. At the sight of curdling blood

1 The Works of Sir TJwmas Browne, ed. Wilkin, 1852, 3 vols.
Hydriotaphia, iii. ch. v. 44, et passim.

2 See Milsand, Etude tur Sir Thomas Srotone, Revua da Den*
Mundes, 1858.

346 THE RENAISSANCE. BOOK TT.

or inilk, he inquires whether there be not something
analogous to the formation of the bird in the egg, or to
that coagulation of chaos which gave birth to our world.
In presence of that impalpable force which makes
liquids freeze, he asks if apoplexy and cataract are not
the effects of a like power, and do not indicate also
the presence of a congealing agency. He is in presence
of nature as an artist, a man of letters in presence of a
living countenance, marking every feature, every move-
ment of physiognomy, so as to be able to divine the
passions and the inner disposition, ceaselessly correcting
and undoing his interpretations, kept in agitation by
thought of the invisible forces which operate beneath
the visible envelope. The whole of the middle-age
and of antiquity, with their theories and imaginations,
Platonism, Cabalism, Christian theology, Aristotle's sub-
stantial forms, the specific forms of the alchemists, —
all human speculations, entangled and transformed one
within the other, meet simultaneously in his brain, so
as to open up to him vistas of this unknown world.
The accumulation, the pile, the confusion, the ferment-
ation and the inner swarming, mingled with vapours
and flashes, the tumultuous overloading of his imagina-
tion and his mind, oppress and agitate him. In this
expectation and emotion his curiosity takes hold of
everything ; in reference to the least fact, the most
special, the most obsolete, the most chimerical, he
conceives a chain of complicated investigations, calculat-
ing how the ark could contain all creatures, with their
provision of food ; how Perpenna, at a banquet, arranged
the guests so as to strike Sertorius ; what trees must
have grown on the banks of Acheron, supposing that
there were any ; whether quincunx plantations had not

CHAP. i. THE PAGAN RENAISSANCE. 347

their origin in Eden, and whether the numbers and
geometrical figures contained in the lozenge-form are
not met with in all the productions of nature and art.
You may recognise here the exuberance and the strange
caprices of an inner development too ample and too
strong. Archaeology, chemistry, history, nature, there
is nothing in which he is not passionately interested,
which does not cause his memory and his inventive
powers to overflow, which does not summon up within
him the idea of some force, certainly admirable, possibly
infinite. But what completes his picture, what signal-
ises the advance of science, is the fact that his imagina-
tion provides a counterbalance against itself. He is as
fertile in doubts as he is in explanations. If he sees
a thousand reasons which tend to one view, he sees
also a thousand which tend to the contrary. At the
two extremities of the same fact, he raises up to the
clouds, but in equal piles, the scaffolding of contradic-
tory arguments. Having made a guess, he knows that
it is but a guess; he pauses, ends with a perhaps,
recommends verification. His writings consist only of
opinions, given as such ; even his principal work is a
refutation of popular errors. In the main, he proposes
questions, suggests explanations, suspends his judg-
ments, nothing more ; but this is enough : when the
search is so eager, when the paths in which it proceeds
are so numerous, when it is so scrupulous in securing
its hold, the issue of the pursuit is sure ; we are but a
few steps from the truth.

V.

In this band of scholars, dreamers, and inquirers, ap-
pears the most comprehensive, sensible, originative of the

348 THE RENAISSANCE. BOOK n.

minds of the age, Francis Bacon, a great and luminous
intellect, one of the finest of this poetic progeny, who,
like his predecessors, was naturally disposed to clothe
his ideas in the most splendid dress : in this age, a
thought did not seem complete until it had assumed
form and colour. But what distinguishes him from the
others is, that with him an image only serves to concen-
trate meditation. He reflected long, stamped on his mind
all the parts and relations of "his subject ; he is master
of it, and then, instead of exposing this complete idea in
a graduated chain of reasoning, he embodies it in a
comparison so expressive, exact, lucid, that behind the
figure we perceive all the details of the idea, like liquor
in a fine crystal vase. Judge of his style by a single
example :

"For as water, whether it be the dew of Heaven or the
springs of the earth, easily scatters and loses itself in the ground,
except it be collected into some receptacle, where it may by union
and consort comfort and sustain itself (and for that cause, the
industry of man has devised aqueducts, cisterns, and pools, and
likewise beautified them with various ornaments of magnificence
and state, as weU as for use and necessity) ; so this excellent
liquor of knowledge, whether it descend from divine inspiration
or spring from human sense, would soon perish and vanish into
oblivion, if it were not preserved in books, traditions, conferences,
and especially in places appointed for such matters as universities,
colleges, and schools, where it may have both a fixed habitation,
and means and opportunity of increasing and collecting itself."1

" The greatest error of all the rest, is the mistaking or mis-
placing of the last or farthest end of knowledge : for men have
entered into a desire of learning and knowledge, sometimes upon
a natural curiosity and inquisitive appetite ; sometimes to

1 Bacon's Works. Translation of the De Augments
Book ii. ; To the King.

FRANCIS BACON.

CHAP. i. THE PAGAN RENAISSANCE. 349

entertain their minds with variety and delight ; sometimes for
ornament and reputation; and sometimes to enable them to
victory of wit and contradiction ; and most times for lucre and
profession ; and seldom sincerely to give a true account of their
gift of reason, to the benefit and use of men : as if there were
sought in knowledge a couch whereupon to rest a searching and
restless spirit ; or a terrace, for a wandering and variable mind
to walk up and down with a fair prospect ; or a tower of state,
for a proud -mind to raise itself upon ; or a fort or commanding
ground, for strife and contention ; or a shop, for profit or sale ;
and not a rich storehouse, for the glory of the Creator, and the
relief of man's estate."1

This is his mode of thought, by symbols, not by
analysis ; instead of explaining his idea, he transposes
and translates it, — translates it entire, to the smallest
details, enclosing all in the majesty of a grand period, or
in the brevity of a striking sentence. Thence springs
a style of admirable richness, gravity, and vigour, now
solemn and symmetrical, now concise and piercing,
always elaborate and full of colour.2 There is nothing
in English prose superior to his diction.

Thence is derived also his manner of conceiving things.
He is not a dialectician, like Hobbes or Descartes, apt
in arranging ideas, in educing one from another, in
leading his reader from the simple to the complex by
an unbroken chain. He is a producer of conceptions
and of sentences. The matter being explored, he says
to us : " Such it is ; touch it not on that side ; it must
be approached from the other." Nothing more ; no proof,
no effort to convince : he affirms, and does nothing more

1 Bacon's Wvrks. Translation of the De Augmentis Srientfarum,
Book i. The true end of learning mistaken.
3 Especially in the Essays.

350 THE RENAISSANCE. BOOK n.

he has thought in the manner of artists and poets, and
he speaks after the manner of prophets and seers.
Cogitata et visa this title of one of his hooks might be
the title of all. The most admirable, the Novum Organum,
is a string of aphorisms, — a collection, as it were, of
scientific decrees, as of an oracle who foresees the future
and reveals the truth. And to make the resemblance
complete, he expresses them by poetical figures, by
enigmatic abbreviations, almost in Sibylline verses :
Idola specus, Idola tribus, Idola fori, Idola theatri, every
one will recall these strange names, by which he signifies
the four kinds of illusions to which man is subject.1
Shakspeare and the seers do not contain more vigorous
or expressive condensations of thought, more resembling
inspiration, and in Bacon they are to be found every-
where. On the whole, his process is that of the creators ;
it is intuition, not reasoning. When he has laid up
his store of facts, the greatest possible, on some vast
subject, on some entire province of the mind, on the
whole anterior philosophy, on the general condition of
the sciences, on the power and limits of human reason,
he casts over all this a comprehensive view, as it were
a great net, brings up a universal idea, condenses his
idea into a maxim, and hands it to us with the words,
" Verify and profit by it."

There is nothing more hazardous, more like fantasy,
than this mode of thought, when it is not checked by
natural and strong good sense. This common sense,
which is a kind of natural divination, the stable equi-
librium of an intellect always gravitating to the true,

1 See also Novum, Organum, Books i. and ii. ; the twenty-seven
kinds of examples, with their metaphorical names : Instantice cruds,
divcrtii januce, Instantice innuentest polychrcsta, magicce, etc.

CHAP. i. THE PAGAN RENAISSANCE. 351

like the needle to the pole, Bacon possesses iii the highest
degree. He has a pre-eminently practical, even an
utilitarian mind, such as we meet with later in Bentham,
and such as their business habits were to impress more
and more upon the English. At the age of sixteen,
while at the university, he was dissatisfied with Aris-
totle's philosophy,1 not that he thought meanly of the
author, whom, on the contrary, he calls a great genius ;
but because it seemed to him of no practical utility,
incapable of producing works which might promote the
well-being of men. We see that from the outset he
struck upon his dominant idea : all else comes to him
from this; a contempt for antecedent philosophy, the
conception of a diiferent system, the entire reformation
of the sciences by the indication of a new goal, the de-
finition of a distinct method, the opening up of unsus-
pected anticipations.2 It is never speculation which
he relishes, but the practical application of it. His
eyes are turned not to heaven, but to earth, not to
things abstract and vain, but to things palpable and
solid, not to curious but to profitable truths. He seeks
to better the condition of men, to labour for the welfare
of mankind, to enrich human life with new discoveries
and new resources, to equip mankind with new powers
and new instruments of action. His philosophy itself
is but an instrument, organum, a sort of machine or
lever constructed to enable the intellect to raise a weight,
to break through obstacles, to open up vistas, to accom-
plish tasks which had hitherto surpassed its power.

1 The Works of Francis Bacon, London 1824, vol. vii. p. 2. Latin
Biography by Rawley.

3 This point is brought out by the review of Lord Macaulay
Critical and Historical Essays, vol. iii.

352 THE RENAISSANCE. BOOK n.

In bis eyes, every special science, like science in general,
should be an implement. He invites mathematicians
to quit their pure geometry, to study numbers only with
a view to natural philosophy, to seek formulas only to
calculate real quantities and natural motions. He
recommends moralists to study the soul, the passions,
habits, temptations, not merely in a speculative way, but
with a view to the cure or diminution of vice, and as-
signs to the science of morals as its goal the amelioration
of morals. For him, the object of science is always the
establishment of an art, that is, the production of some-
thing of practical utility ; when he wished to describe
the efficacious nature of his philosophy by a tale, he
delineated in the New Atlantis, with a poet's boldness
and the precision of a seer, almost employing the very
terms in use now, modern applications, and the present
organisation of the sciences, academies, observatories, air-
balloons, submarine vessels, the improvement of land,
the transmutation of species, regenerations, the discovery
of remedies, the preservation of food. The end of our
foundation, says his principal personage, is the know-
ledge of causes and secret motions of things, and the
enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effect-
ing of all things possible. And this " possible " is infi-
nite.

How did this grand and just conception originate ?
Doubtless common sense and genius too were necessary
to its production ; but neither common sense nor genius
was lacking to men : there had been more than one
who, observing, like Bacon, the progress of particular
industries, could, like him, have conceived of universal
industry, and from certain limited ameliorations have
advanced to unlimited amelioration. Here we see the

CHAP. i. THE PAGAN RENAISSANCE. 353

power of connection ; men think they do everything by
their individual thought, and they can do nothing with-
out the assistance of the thoughts of their neighbours ;
they fancy that they are following the small voice with-
in them, but they only hear it because it is swelled by
the thousand buzzing and imperious voices, which,
issuing from all surrounding or distant circumstances,
are confounded with it in an harmonious vibration.
Generally they hear it, as Bacon did, from the first
moment of reflection; but it had become inaudible
among the opposing sounds which came from without
to smother it. Could this confidence in the infinite
enlargement of human power, this glorious idea of the
universal conquest of nature, this firm hope in the con-
tinual increase of well-being and happiness, have germi-
nated, grown, occupied an intelligence entirely, and
thence have struck its roots, been propagated and spread
over neighbouring intelligences, in a time of discourage-
ment and decay, when men believed the end of the
world at hand, when things were falling into ruin about
them, wrhen Christian mysticism, as in the first centuries,
ecclesiastical tyranny, as in the fourteenth century, were
convincing them of their impotence, by perverting their
intellectual efforts and curtailing their liberty. On the
contrary, such hopes must then have seemed to be out-
bursts of pride, or suggestions of the carnal mind. They
did seem so ; and the last representatives of ancient
science, and the first of the new, were exiled or impris-
oned, assassinated or burned. In order to be developed
an idea must be in harmony with surrounding civili-
sation ; before man can expect to attain the dominion
over nature, or attempts to improve his condition,
amelioration must have begun on all sides, industries
VOL. i. 2 A

354 THE KENAISSANCE. BOOK IT.

have increased, knowledge have been accumulated, the
arts expanded, a hundred thousand irrefutable witnesses
must have come incessantly to give proof of his power and
assurance of his progress. The " masculine birth of the
time " (temporis partus masculus) is the title which Bacon
applies to his work, and it is a true one. In fact, the
whole age co-operated in it; by this creation it was
finished. The consciousness of human power and pro-
sperity gave to the Renaissance its first energy, its ideal,
its poetic materials, its distinguishing features ; and now
it furnishes it with its final expression, its scientific
doctrine, and its ultimate object.

We may add also, its method. For, the end of a
journey once determined, the route is laid down, since the
end always determines the route ; when the point to be
reached is changed, the path of approach is changed,
and science, varying its object, varies also its method.
So long as it limited its effort to the satisfying an idle
curiosity, opening out speculative vistas, establishing a
sort of opera in speculative minds, it could launch out
any moment into metaphysical abstractions and dis-
tinctions : it was enough for it to skim over experience ;
it soon quitted it, and came all at once upon great words,
quiddities, the principle of individuation, final causes.
Half proofs sufficed science ; at bottom it did not care
to establish a truth, but to get an opinion; and its
instrument, the syllogism, was serviceable only for
refutations, not for discoveries : it took general laws for
a starting-point instead of a' point of arrival ; instead
of going to find them, it fancied them found. The
syllogism was good in the schools, not in nature; it
made disputants, not discoverers. From the moment
that science had art for an end, and men studied in

CHAP. i. THE PAGAN RENAISSANCE. 355

order to act, all was transformed ; for we cannot act,
without certain and precise knowledge. Forces, before
they can be employed, must be measured and verified ;
before we can build a house, we must know exactly the
resistance of the beams, or the house will collapse;
before we can cure a sick man, we must know with
certainty the effect of a remedy, or the patient will die.
Practice makes certainty and exactitude a necessity to
science, because practice is impossible when it has
nothing to lean upon but guesses and approximations.
How can we eliminate guesses and approximations ?
How introduce into science solidity and precision?
We must imitate the cases in which science, issuing in
practice, has proved to be precise and certain, and these
cases are the industries. We must, as in the industries,
observe, essay, grope about, verify, keep our mind fixed
on sensible and particular things, advance to general
rules only step by step ; not anticipate experience, but
follow it; not imagine nature, but interpret it. For
every general effect, such as heat, whiteness, hardness,
liquidity, we must seek a general condition, so that ID
producing the condition we may produce the effect.
And for this it is necessary, by fit rejections and ex-
clusions, to extract the condition sought from the heap
of facts in which it lies buried, construct the table of
cases from which the effect is absent, the table where it
is present, the table where the effect is shown in various
degrees, so as to isolate and bring to light the condition
which produced it.1 Then we shall have, not useless
universal axioms, but efficacious mediate axioms, true
laws from which we can derive works, and which are
the sources of power in the same degree as the sources

1 Novum Oryamim. ii. In and 16.

356 THE RENAISSANCE. BOOK 11.

of light.1 Bacon described and predicted in this modern
science and industry, their correspondence, method,
resources, principle ; and after more than two centuries,
it is still to him that we go even at the present day to
look for the theory of what we are attempting and
doing.

Beyond this great view, he has discovered nothing.
Cowley, one of his admirers, rightly said that, like
Moses on Mount Pisgah, he was the first to announce
the promised land ; but he might have added quite as
justly, that, like Moses, he did not enter there. He
pointed out the route, but did not travel it ; he taught
men how to discover natural laws, but discovered none
His definition of heat is extremely imperfect. His
Natural History is full of fanciful explanations.2 Like
the poets, he peoples nature with instincts and desires ;
attributes to bodies an actual voracity, to the atmosphere
a thirst for light, sounds, odours, vapours, which it
drinks in ; to metals a sort of haste to be incorporated
with acids. He explains the duration of the bubbles
of air which float on the surface of liquids, by supposing
that air has a very small or no appetite for height.
He sees in every quality, weight, ductility, hardness, a
distinct essence which has its special cause; so that
when a man knows the cause of every quality of gold, he
will be able to put all these causes together, and make
gold. In the main, with the alchemists, Paracelsus and
Gilbert, Kepler himself, with all the men of his time,
men of imagination, nourished on Aristotle, he repre-
sents nature as a compound of secret and living energies,
inexplicable and primordial forces, distinct and indecom-

1 Novum Organum, i. i. 3.
* Katural History, 800, 24, etc. De Atigmentis, iii. 1.

CHAP. I. THE PAGAN RENAISSANCE. 357

posable essences, adapted each by the will of the Creator
to produce a distinct effect. He almost saw souls
endowed with latent repugnances and occult inclina-
tions, which aspire to or resist certain directions, certain
mixtures, and certain localities. On this account also
he confounds everything in his researches in an undis-
tinguishable mass, vegetative and medicinal properties,
mechanical and curative, physical and moral, without
considering the most complex as depending on the
simplest, but each on the contrary in itself, and taken
apart, as an irreducible and independent existence.
Obstinate in this error, the thinkers of the age mark
time without advancing. They see clearly with Bacon
the wide field of discovery, but they cannot enter upon
it. They want an idea, and for want of this idea they
do not advance. The disposition of mind which but
now was a lever, is become an obstacle : it must be
changed, that the obstacle may be got rid of. For ideas,
I mean great and efficacious ones, do not come at will
nor by chance, by the effort of an individual, or by a
happy accident. Methods and philosophies, as well as
literatures and religions, arise from the spirit of the age ;
and this spirit of the age makes them potent or power-
less. One state of public intelligence excludes a certain
kind of literature ; another, a certain scientific concep-
tion. When it happens thus, writers and thinkers
labour in vain, the literature is abortive, the conception
does not make its appearance. In vain they turn one
way and another, trying to remove the weight which
hinders them ; something stronger than themselves
paralyses their hands and frustrates their endeavours.
The central pivot of the vast wheel on which human
affairs move must be displaced one notch, that all may

358 THE RENAISSANCE. BOOK u

move with its motion. At this moment the pivot was
moved, and thus a revolution of the great wheel begins,
bringing round a new conception of nature, and in
consequence that part of the method which was lacking.
To the diviners, the creators, the comprehensive and
impassioned minds who seized objects in a lump and in
masses, succeeded the discursive thinkers, the systematic
thinkers, the graduated and clear logicians, who, dis-
posing ideas in continuous series, lead the hearer grad-
ually from the simple to the most complex by .easy and
unbroken paths. Descartes superseded Bacon ; the
classical age obliterated the Eenaissance; poetry and
lofty imagination gave way before rhetoric, eloquence,
and analysis. In this transformation of mind, ideas
were transformed. Everything was drained dry and
simplified. The universe, like all else, was reduced to
two or three notions ; and the conception of nature,
which was poetical, became mechanical. Instead of
souls, living forces, repugnances, and attractions, we have
pulleys, levers, impelling forces. The world, which
seemed a mass of instinctive powers, is now like a
mere machinery of cog-wheels. Beneath this adventur-
ous supposition lies a large and certain truth : that
there is, namely, a scale of facts, some at the summit
very complex, others at the base very simple; those
above having their origin in those below, so that the
lower ones explain the higher ; and that we must seek
the primary laws of things in the laws of motion. The
search was made, and Galileo found them. Thenceforth
the work of the Eenaissance, outstripping the extreme
point to which Bacon had pushed it, and at which he
had left it, was able to proceed onward by itself, and
did so proceed, without limit.

CHAP. ii. THE THEATRE. 359

CHAPTEE II.

WE must look at this world more closely, and beneath
the ideas which are developed seek for the living men ;
it is the theatre especially which is the original product
of the English Eenaissance, and it is the theatre
especially which will exhibit the men of the English Ee-
naissance. Forty poets, amongst them ten of superior
rank, as well as one, the greatest of all artists who
have represented the soul in words ; many hundreds of
pieces, and nearly fifty masterpieces ; the drama ex-
tended over all the provinces of history, imagination,
and fancy, — expanded so as to embrace comedy, tragedy,
pastoral and fanciful literature — to represent all degrees
of human condition, and all the caprices of human
invention — to express all the perceptible details of
actual truth, and all the philosophic grandeur of general
reflection ; the stage disencumbered of all precept and
freed from all imitation, given up and appropriated
in the minutest particulars to the reigning taste and
public intelligence : all this was a vast and manifold
work, capable by its flexibility, its greatness, and its
form, of receiving and preserving the exact imprint of
the age and of the nation.1

1 "The very age and body of the time, his form and pressure.'1 —
Shakspcare.

360 THE RENAISSANCE. BOOK n.

Let us try, then, to set before our eyes this public, this
audience, and this stage — all connected with one another,
as in every natural and living work ; and if ever there
was a living and natural work, it is here. There were
already seven theatres in London, in Shakspeare's time,
so brisk and universal was the taste for dramatic
representations. Great and rude contrivances, awkward
in their construction, barbarous in their appointments ;
but a fervid imagination readily supplied all that they
lacked, and hardy bodies endured all inconveniences
without difficulty. On a dirty site, on the banks of
the Thames, rose the principal theatre, the Globe, a
sort of hexagonal tower, surrounded by a muddy ditch,
on which was hoisted a red flag. The common people
could enter as well as the rich : there were sixpenny,
twopenny, even penny seats ; but they could not see it
without money. If it rained, and it often rains in
London, the people in the pit, butchers, mercers, bakers,
sailors, apprentices, receive the streaming rain upon
their heads. I suppose they did not trouble themselves
about it ; it was not so long since they began to pave
the streets of London ; and when men, like these,
have had experience of sewers and puddles, they are
not afraid of catching cold. While waiting for the
piece, they amuse themselves after their fashion, drink
beer, crack nuts, eat fruit, howl, and now and then re-
sort to their fists; they have been known to fall upon
the actors, and turn the theatre upside down. At
other times they were dissatisfied and went to the tavern
to give the poet a hiding, or toss him in a blanket;
they were coarse fellows, and there was no month

CHAP. ii. THE THEATRE. 361

when the cry of " Clubs " did not call them out of their
shops to exercise their brawny arms. When the beei
took effect, there was a great upturned barrel in the
pit, a peculiar receptacle for general use. The smell
rises, and then comes the cry, " Burn the juniper ! "
They burn some in a plate on the stage, and the heavy
smoke rills the air. Certainly the folk there assembled
could scarcely get disgusted at anything, and cannot
have had sensitive noses. In the time of Eabelais
there was not much cleanliness to speak of. Eemember
that they were hardly out of the middle-age, and that
in the middle-age man lived on a dunghill.

Above them, on the stage, were the spectators able
to pay a shilling, the elegant people, the gentlefolk.
These were sheltered from the rain, and if they chose
to pay an extra shilling, could have a stool. To this
were reduced the prerogatives of rank and the devices
of comfort : it often happened that there were not stools
enough ; then they lie down on the ground : this was
not a time to be dainty. They play cards, smoke,
insult the pit, who gave it them back without stinting,
and throw apples at them into the bargain. They also
gesticulate, swear in Italian, French, English;1 crack
aloud jokes in dainty, composite, high-coloured, words :
in short, they have the energetic, original, gay manners
of artists, the same humour, the same absence of con-
straint, and, to complete the resemblance, the same
desire to make themselves singular, the same imaginative
cravings, the same absurd and picturesque devices,
beards cut to a point, into the shape of a fan, a spade,
the letter T, gaudy and expensive dresses, copied from
five or six neighbouring nations, embroidered, laced

1 Ben Jonson, Every Man in his Humour ; Cynthia's Revels.

362 THE RENAISSANCE. BOOK n.

with gold, motley, continually heightened in effect, or
changed for others : there was, as it were, a carnival in
their brains as well as on their backs.

With such spectators illusions could be produced
without much trouble : there were no preparations or
perspectives ; few or no moveable scenes : their imagi-
nations took all this upon them. A scroll in big letters
announced to the public that they were in London or
Constantinople, and that was enough to carry the
public to the desired place. There was no trouble
about probability. Sir Philip Sidney writes :

" You shall have Asia of the one side, and Africke of the other,
and so many other under-kingdomes, that the Plaier when hee
comes in, must ever begin with telling where hee is, or else the
tale will not be conceived. Now shall you have three Ladies
walke to gather flowers, and then wee must beleeve the stage to
be a garden. By and by wee heare newes of shipwracke in the
same place, then wee are to blame if we accept it not for a
rocke ; . . . while in the meane time two armies flie in, repre-
sented with foure swordes and bucklers, and then what hard
heart will not receive it for a pitched field ? Now of time they
are much more liberall. For ordinary it is, that two young
Princes fall in love, after many traverses, shee is got with childe,
delivered of a faire boy, hee is lost, groweth a man, falleth in
love, and is readie to get another childe ; and all this in two
houres space." l

Doubtless these enormities were somewhat reduced
under Shakspeare; with a few hangings, crude repre-
sentations of animals, towers, forests, they assisted
somewhat the public imagination. But after all, in
Shakspeare's plays as in all others, the imagination
from within is chiefly drawn upon for the machinery;

1 The Defence of Poesie, ed. 1629, p. 562.

CHAP. ii. THE THEATRE. 363

it must lend itself to all, substitute all, accept for a
queen a young man who has just been shaved, endure
in one act ten changes of place, leap suddenly over
twenty years or five hundred miles,1 take half- a
dozen supernumeraries for forty thousand men, and to
have represented by the rolling of the drums all the
battles of Caesar, Henry V., Coriolanus, Eichard III.
And imagination, being so overflowing and so young,
accepts all this ! Eecall your own youth ; for my part,
the deepest emotions I have ever felt at a theatre were
given to me by a strolling bevy of four young girls,
playing comedy and tragedy on a stage in a coffeehouse ;
true, I was eleven years old. So in this theatre, at this
moment, their souls were fresh, as ready to feel every-
thing as the poet was to dare everything.

II.

These are but externals ; let us try to advance
further, to observe the passions, the bent of mind, the
inner man : it is this inner state which raised and
modelled the drama, as everything else ; invisible
inclinations are everywhere the cause of visible works,
and the interior shapes the exterior. What are these
townspeople, courtiers, this public, whose taste fashions
the theatre? what is there peculiar in the structure and
condition of their minds ? The condition must needs
be peculiar; for the drama flourishes all of a sudden,
and for sixty years together, with marvellous luxuriance,
and at the end of this time is arrested so that no effort
could ever revive it. The structure must be peculiar ;
for of all theatres, old and new, this is distinct in form,
and displays a style, action, characters, an idea of life,
which are not found in any age or any country besida

1 Winter's Talt ; Cyiribeline ; Julius Co&sar

364 THE RENAISSANCE. BOOK IL

This particular feature is the free and complete expan-
sion of nature.

What we call nature in men is, man such as he was
before culture and civilisation had deformed and re-
formed him. Almost always, when a new generation
arrives at manhood and consciousness, it finds a code
of precepts impose on it with all the weight and autho-
rity of antiquity. A hundred kinds of chains, a
hundred thousand kinds of ties, religion, morality, good
breeding, every legislation which regulates sentiments,
morals, manners, fetter and tame the creature of impulse
and passion which breathes and frets within each of us.
There is nothing like that here. It is a regeneration,
and the curb of the past is wanting to the present
Catholicism, reduced to external ceremony and clerical
chicanery, had just ended ; Protestantism, arrested in
its first gropings after truth, or straying into sects, had
not yet gained the mastery; the religion of discipline
was grown feeble, and the religion of morals was not
yet established ; men ceased to listen to the directions
of the clergy, and had not yet spelt out the law of
conscience. The church was turned into an assembly-
room, as in Italy ; the young fellows came to St. Paul's
to walk, laugh, chatter, display their new cloaks ; the
thing had even passed into a custom. They paid for
the noise they made with their spurs, and this tax was
a source of income to the canons ; l pickpockets, loose

1 Strype, in his Annals of the Reformation (1 571), says : " Many
now were wholly departed from the communion of the church, and
came no more to hear divine service in their parish churches, nor re-
ceived the holy sacrament, according to the laws of the realm."
Richard Baxter, in his Life, published in 1696, says : " We lived in a
country that had but little preaching at all. . . . la the village
where I lived the Reader read the Common Prayer briefly ; and the

CHAP. ii. THE THEATKE. 365

girls, came there by* crowds; these latter struck their
bargains while service was going on. Imagine, in short,
that the scruples of conscience and the severity of the
Puritans were at that time odious and ridiculed on the
stage, and judge of the difference between this sensual,
unbridled England, and the correct, disciplined, stiff
England of our own time. Ecclesiastical or secular, we
find no signs of rule. In the failure of faith, reason
had not gained sway, and opinion is as void of authority
as tradition. The imbecile age, which has just ended,
continues buried in scorn, with its ravings, its verse-
makers, and its pedantic text-books ; and out of the
liberal opinions derived from antiquity, from Italy, France,
and Spain, every one could pick and choose as it pleased
him, without stooping to restraint or acknowledging a
superiority. There was no model imposed on them, as
nowadays; instead of affecting imitation, they affected
originality.1 Each strove to be himself, with his own
oaths, peculiar ways, costumes, his specialties of conduct
and humour, and to be unlike every one else. They
said not, " So and so is done," but " I do so and so."
Instead of restraining they gave free vent to themselves.
There was no etiquette of society ; save for an exagge-
rated jargon of chivalresque courtesy, they are masters
of speech and action on the impulse of the moment.
You will find them free from decorum, as of all else.

rest of the day, even till dark night almost, except Eating time, was
spent in Dancing under a Maypole and a great tree, not far from my
father's door, where all the Town did meet together. And though one
of my father's own Tenants was the piper, he could not restrain him
nor break the sport. So that we could not read the Scripture in our
family without the great disturbance of the Taber and Pipe and noise
in the street"

1 Ben Jonson, Every Man in his Humour.

366 THE RENAISSANCE. BOOK n.

In this outbreak and absence of fetters, they resemble
fine strong horses let loose in the meadow. Their in-
born instincts have not been tamed, nor muzzled, nor
diminished.

On the contrary, they have been preserved intact by
bodily and military training ; and escaping as they were
from barbarism, not from civilisation, they had not been
acted upon by the innate softening and hereditary
tempering which are now transmitted with the blood,
and civilise a man from the moment of his birth.
This is why man, who for three centuries has been a
domestic animal, was still almost a savage beast, and
the force of his muscles and the strength of his nerves
increased the boldness and energy of his passions. Look
at these uncultivated men, men of the people, how
suddenly the blood warms and rises to their face ; their
fists double, their lips press together, and those vigorous
bodies rush at once into action. The courtiers of that
age were like our men of the people. They had the
same taste for the exercise of their limbs, the same
indifference toward the inclemencies of the weather, the
same coarseness of language, the same undisguised
sensuality. They were carmen in body and gentlemen
in sentiment, with the dress of actors and the tastes of
artists. " At fourtene," says John Hardyng, " a lordes
sonnes shalle to felde hunte the dere, and catch an
hardynesse. For dere to hunte and slea, and see them
blede, ane hardyment gyffith to his courage. ... At
sextene yere, to werray and to wage, to juste and ryde,
and castels to assayle . . . and every day his armure
to assay in fete of armes with some of his meyne." ]

1 The Chronicle of John Hardyng (1436), ed. H. Ellis, 1812.
Preface.

CHAP. n. THE THEATRE. 367

When ripened to manhood, he is employed with the
bow, in wrestling, leaping, vaulting. Henry VIII.' s
court, in its noisy merriment, was like a village fair.
The king, says Holinshed, exercised himself " dailie in
shooting, singing, dancing, wrestling, casting of the barre,
plaieing at the recorders, flute, virginals, in setting of
songs, and making of ballads." He leaps the moats
with a pole, and was once within an ace of being killed.
He is so fond of wrestling, that publicly, on the field of
the Cloth of Gold, he seized Francis I. in his arms to try
a throw with him. This is how a common soldier or a
bricklayer nowadays tries a new comrade. In fact, they
regarded gross jests and brutal buffooneries as amuse-
ments, as soldiers and bricklayers do now. In every
nobleman's house there was a fool, whose business it was
to utter pointed jests, to make eccentric gestures, horrible
faces, to sing licentious songs, as we might hear now in
a beer-house. They thought insults and obscenity a
joke. They were foul-mouthed, they listened to
Rabelais' words undiluted, and delighted in conversation
which would revolt us. They had no respect for huma-
nity ; the rules of proprieties and the habits of good
breeding began only under Louis XIV., and by imita-
tion of the French; at this time they all blurted out
the word that fitted in, and that was most frequently a
coarse word. You will see on the stage, in Shakspeare's
Pericles, the filth of a haunt of vice.1 The great lords,
the well-dressed ladies, speak Billingsgate. When
Henry V. pays his court to Catherine of France, it is
with the coarse bearing of a sailor who may have taken
a fancy to a sutler ; and like the tars who tattoo a

1 Act iv. 2 and 4. See also the character of Calypso in Massinger ;
Putana in Ford ; Protalyce in Beaumont and Fletcher.

368 THE RENAISSANCE. BOOK IL

heart on their arms to prove their love for the girls they
left behind them, there were men who " devoured sulphur
and drank urine " l to win their mistress by a proof of
affection. Humanity is as much lacking as decency.2
Blood, suffering, does not move them. The court fre-
quents bear and bull baitings, where dogs are ripped up
and chained beasts are sometimes beaten to death, and
it was, says an officer of the palace, " a charming en-
tertainment."3 No wonder they used their arms like
clodhoppers and gossips. Elizabeth used to beat her
maids of honour, "so that these beautiful girls could
often be heard crying and lamenting in a piteous man-
ner." One day she spat upon Sir Mathew's fringed coat;
at another time, when Essex, whom she was scolding,
turned his back, she gave him a box on the ear. It
was then the practice of great ladies to beat their
children and their servants. Poor Jane Grey was
sometimes so wretchedly "boxed, struck, pinched, and

1 Middleton, Dutch Courtezan.

2 Commission given by Henry VIII. to the Earl of Hertford, 1544 :
" You are there to put all to fire and sword ; to burn Edinburgh
town, and to raze and deface it, when you have sacked it, and gotten
what you can out of it. . . . Do what you can out of hand, and
without long tarrying, to beat down and overthrow the castle, sack
Holy rood- House, and as many towns and villages about Edinburgh as
ye conveniently can ; sack Leith, and burn and subvert it, and all the
rest, putting man, woman, and child to fire and sword, without excep-
tion, when any resistance shall be made against you ; and this done,
pass over to the Fife land, and extend like extremities and destructions
in all towns and villages whereunto ye may reach conveniently, not
forgetting amongst all the rest, so to spoil and turn upside down the
cardinal's town of St. Andrew's, as the upper stone may be the nethei,
aud not one stick stand by another, sparing no creature alive within
the same, specially such as either in friendship or blood be allied to
the cardinal. This journey shall succeed most to his majesty'i
honour "

3 Lanenam, A Goodly Relief.

CHAP. ii. THE THEATRE. 369

ill-treated in other manners which she dare not relate/'
that she used to wish herself dead. Their first idea is
to come to words, to blows, to have satisfaction. As in
feudal times, they appeal at once to arms, and retain the
habit of taking the law in their own hands, and without
delay. " On Thursday laste," writes Gilbert Talbot to
the Earl and Countess of Shrewsbury, "as my Lorde
Eytche was rydynge in the streates, there was one
Wyndam that stode in a dore, and shotte a dagge at
him, thynkynge to have slayne him. . . . The same daye,
also, as Sr John Conway was goynge in the streetes,
Mr- Lodovyke Grevell came sodenly upon him, and
stroke him on the hedd wth a sworde. ... I am forced
to trouble yor Honors wth thes tryflynge matters, for I
know no greater." l No one, not even the queen, is
safe among these violent dispositions.2 Again, when
one man struck another in the precincts of the court,
his hand was cut off, and the arteries stopped with a
red-hot iron. Only such atrocious imitations of their
own crimes, and the painful image of bleeding and
suffering flesh, could tame their vehemence and restrain
the uprising of their instincts. Judge now what mate-
rials they furnish to the theatre, and what characters
they look for at the theatre. To please the public, the
stage cannot deal too much in open lust and the strong-
est passions; it must depict man attaining the limit of
his desires, unchecked, almost mad, now trembling and
rooted before the white palpitating flesh which his eyes
devour, now haggard and grinding his teeth before the

1 13th February 1587. Nathan Drake, Shakspeafe and his Times,
ii. p. 165. See also the same work for all these details.

a Essex, when struck by the queen, put his hand on the hilt of his
eword.

VOL. I 2 B

370 THE RENAISSANCE. BOOK 11

enemy whom he wishes to tear to pieces, now carried
beyond himself and overwhelmed at the sight of the
honours and wealth which he covets, always raging and
enveloped in a tempest of eddying ideas, sometimes
shaken by impetuous joy, more often on the verge of
fury and madness, stronger, more ardent, more daringly
let loose to infringe on reason and law than ever. We
hear from the stage as from the history of the time,
these fierce murmurs : the sixteenth century is like a
den of lions.

Amid passions so strong as these there is not one lack-
ing. Nature appears here in all its violence, but also in
all its fulness. If nothing had been weakened, nothing
had been mutilated. It is the entire man who is dis-
played, heart, mind, body, senses, with his noblest and
finest aspirations, as with his most bestial and savage
appetites, without the preponderance of any dominant
circumstance to cast him altogether in one direction, to
exalt or degrade him. He has not become rigid, as he
will be under Puritanism. He is not uncrowned as in
the Eestoration. After the hollowness and weariness
of the fifteenth century, he rose up by a second birth,
as before in Greece man had risen by a first birth ; and
now, as then, the temptations of the outer world came
combined to raise his faculties from their sloth and
torpor. A sort of generous warmth spread over them
to ripen and make them flourish. Peace, prosperity,
comfort began ; new industries and increasing activity
suddenly multiplied objects of utility and luxury tenfold.
America and India, by their discovery, caused the
treasures and prodigies heaped up afar over distant seas
to shine before their eyes; antiquity re-discovered,
sciences mapped out, the Reformation begun, books

CHAP. ii. THE THEATRE. 371

multiplied by printing, ideas by books, doubled the
means of enjoyment, imagination, and thought. People
wanted to enjoy, to imagine, and to think; for the
desire grows with the attraction, and here all attractions
were combined. There were attractions for the senses,
in the chambers which they began to warm, in the beds
newly furnished with pillows, in the coaches which they
began to use for the first time. There were attractions
for the imagination in the new palaces, arranged after
the Italian manner; in the variegated hangings from
Flanders ; in the rich garments, gold-embroidered, which,
being continually changed, combined the fancies and the
splendours of all Europe. There were attractions for
the mind, in the noble and beautiful writings which,
spread abroad, translated, explained, brought in philo-
sophy, eloquence, and poetry, from restored antiquity,
and from the surrounding Eenaissances. Under this
appeal all aptitudes and instincts at once started up;
the low and the lofty, ideal and sensual love, gross
cupidity and pure generosity. Eecall what you your-
self experienced, when from being a child you became a
man : what wishes for happiness, what breadth of
anticipation, what intoxication of heart wafted you.
towards all joys ; with what impulse your hands seized
involuntarily and all at once every branch of the tree,
and would not let a single fruit escape. At sixteen
years, like Che'rubin,1 we wish for a servant girl while
we adore a Madonna ; we are capable of every species
of covetousness, and also of every species of self-denial ;
we find virtue more lovely, our meals more enjoyable ;
pleasure has more zest, heroism more worth; there
is no allurement which is not keen ; the sweet-

1 A page in the Mariuge de Figaro, a comedy by Beaumarchais. — TR.

372 THE RENAISSANCE. BOOK 11

ness arid novelty of things are too strong; and in
the hive of passions which buzzes within us, and stings
us like the sting of a bee, we can do nothing but plunge,
one after another, in all directions. Such were the
men of this time, Ealeigh, Essex, Elizabeth, Henry VIII.
himself, excessive and inconstant, ready for devotion
and for crime, violent in good and evil, heroic with
strange weaknesses, humble with sudden changes of
mood, never vile with premeditation like the roysterers
of the Eestoration, never rigid on principle like the
Puritans of the Eevolution, capable of weeping like
children,1 and of dying like men, often base courtiers,
more than once true knights, displaying constantly,
amidst all these contradictions of bearing, only the
fulness of their characters. Thus prepared, they could
take in everything, sanguinary ferocity and refined gen-
erosity, the brutality of shameless debauchery, and the
most divine innocence of love, accept all the characters,
prostitutes and virgins, princes and mountebanks, pass
quickly from trivial buffoonery to lyrical sublimities,
listen alternately to the quibbles of clowns and the songs
of lovers. The drama even, in order to imitate and satisfy
the fertility of their nature, must talk all tongues,
pompous, inflated verse, loaded with imagery, and side
by side with this, vulgar prose : more, it must distort
its natural style and limits ; put songs, poetical devices,
into the discourse of courtiers and the speeches of states-
men ; bring on the stage the fairy world of the opera,
as Middleton says, gnomes, nymphs of the land and sea,
with their groves and their meadows ; compel the gods
to descend upon the stage, and hell itself to furnish its

1 The great Chancellor Burleigh often wept, so harshly was he used
by Elizabeth.

0

CHAP. ii. THE THEATRE. 373

world of marvels. No other theatre is so complicated ;
for nowhere else do we find men so complete.

III.

ILL this free and universal expansion, the passions had
their special bent withal, which was an English one,
inasmuch as they were English. After all, in every age,
under every civilisation, a people is always itself.
Whatever be its dress, goat-skin blouse, gold-laced
doublet, black dress-coat, the five or six great instincts
which it possessed in its forests, follow it in its palaces
and offices. To this day, warlike passions, a gloomy
humour, subsist under the regularity and propriety of
modern manners.1 Their native energy and harshness
pierce through the perfection of culture and the habits
of comfort. Rich young men, on leaving Oxford, go to
hunt bears on the Rocky Mountains, the elephant in
South Africa, live under canvas, box, jump hedges on
horseback, sail their yachts on dangerous coasts, delight
in solitude and peril. The ancient Saxon, the old rover
of the Scandinavian seas, has not perished. Even at
school the children roughly treat one another, withstand
one another, fight like men ; and their character is so in-
domitable, that they need the birch and blows to reduce
them to the discipline of law. Judge what they were
in the sixteenth century ; the English race passed then
for the most warlike of Europe, the most redoubtable in
battle, the most impatient of anything like slavery.2

1 Compare, to understand this character, the parts assigned to
James Harlowe by Richardson, old Osborne by Thackeray, Sir Giles
Overreach by Massinger, and Manly by Wycherley.

2 Hentzner's Travels ; Benvenuto Cellini. See passim, the cos-
tumes printed in Venice and Germany : BellicosissimL Froude, i. pp.
19, 52.

374 THE RENAISSANCE. BOOK n

" English savages " is what Cellini calls them ; and the
" great shins or beef " with which they fill themselves,
keep up the force and ferocity of their instincts. To
harden them thoroughly, institutions work in the same
groove with nature. The nation is armed, every man
is brought up like a soldier, bound to have arms accord-
ing to his condition, to exercise himself on Sundays or
holidays ; from the yeoman to the lord, the old military
constitution keeps them enrolled and ready for action.1
In a state which resembles an army, it is necessary that
punishments, as in an army, shall inspire terror ; and to
make them worse, the hideous Wars of the Roses, which
on every flaw of the succession to the throne are ready
to break out again, are ever present in their recollection.
Such instincts, such a constitution, such a history, raises
before them, with tragic severity, an idea of life : death
is at hand, as well as wounds, the block, tortures. The
fine cloaks of purple which the Renaissances of the South
displayed joyfully in the sun, to wear like a holiday
garment, are here stained with blood, and edged with
black. Throughout,2 a stern discipline, and the axe
ready for every suspicion of treason ; great men, bishops,
a chancellor, princes, the king's relatives, queens, a
protector, all kneeling in the straw, sprinkled the Tower
with their blood ; one after the other they marched past,
stretched out their necks ; the Duke of Buckingham,
Queen Anne Boleyn, Queen Catherine Howard, the
Earl of Surrey, Admiral Seymour, the Duke of Somerset,
Lady Jane Grey and her husband, the Duke of Nor-

1 This is not so true of the English now, if it was in the sixteenth
century, as it is of continental nations. The French lyctes are far more
military in character than English schools. — TIL

• Froude's Hist, of England, vols i il iii.

CHAP. ii. THE THEATRE. 375

thumberland, Mary Stewart, the Earl of Essex, all on
the throne, or on the steps of the throne, in the highest
rank of honours, beauty, youth, and genius ; of the bright
procession nothing is left but senseless trunks, marred
by the tender mercies of the executioner. Shall I
count the funeral pyres, the hangings, living men cut
down from the gibbet, disembowelled, quartered,1 their
limbs cast into the fire, their heads exposed on the
walls ? There is a page in Holinshed which reads like
a death register :

"The five and twentith dale of Maie (1535), was in saint
Paules church at London examined nineteene men and six women
born in Holland, whose opinions were (heretical). Fourteene of
them were condemned, a man and a woman of them were burned
in Smithfield, the other twelve were sent to other townes, there
to be burnt. On the nineteenth of June were three moonkes of
the Charterhouse hanged, drawne, and quartered at Tiburne, and
their heads and quarters set up about London, for denieng the-
king to be supreme head of the church. Also the one and
twentith of the same moneth, and for the same cause, doctor John
Fisher, bishop of Rochester, was beheaded for denieng of the
supremacie, and his head set upon London bridge, but his bodie
buried within Barking churchyard. The pope had elected him
a cardinall, and sent his hat as far as Calais, but his head was
off before his hat was on : so that they met not. On the sixt of
Julie was Sir Thomas Moore beheaded for the like crime, that is
to wit, for denieng the king to be supreme head." 2

None of these murders seem extraordinary ; the chroni-
clers mention them without growing indignant; the
condemned go quietly to the block, as if the thing were

1 "When his heart was torn out he uttered a deep groan."— Exe
cution of Parry ; Strype, iii. 251.

8 Holinshed, Chronicles of England, iiL p. 783.

376 THE RENAISSANCE. BOOK it

perfectly natural. Anne Boleyn said seriously, before
proving up her head to the executioner : " I praie God
save the king, and send him long to reigne over you,
for a gentler, nor a more mercifull prince was there
never."1 Society is, as it were, in a state of siege, so
incited that beneath the idea of order every one enter-
tained the idea of the scaffold. They saw it, the
terrible machine, planted on all the highways of human
life ; and the byways as well as the highways led to it.
A sort of martial law, introduced by conquests into
civil affairs, entered thence into ecclesiastical matters,2
and social economy ended by being enslaved by it. As
in a camp,3 expenditure, dress, the food of each class,
are fixed and restricted ; no one might stray out of his
district, be idle, live after his own devices. Every
stranger was seized, interrogated ; if he could not give
a good account of himself, the parish-stocks bruised his
limbs ; as in time of war he would have passed for a
spy and an enemy, if caught amidst the army. Any
person, says the law,4 found living idly or loiteringly for
the space of three days, shall be marked with a hot
iron on his breast, and adjudged as a slave to the man
who shall inform against him. This one "shall take
the same slave, and give him bread, water, or small
drink, and refuse meat, and cause him to work, by
beating, chaining, or otherwise, in such work and labour
as he shall put him to, be it never so vile." He may
sell him, bequeath him, let him out for hire, or trade
upon him " after the like sort as they may do of any
other their rnoveable goods or chattels," put a ring of
iron about his neck or leg ; if he runs away and absents

1 Holinshed, Chronicles of England, iii. p. 797.
8 T7nder Henry IV. and Henry V. » Proude, i. 15. * In 1547.

CHAP. ii. THE THEATRE. 377

himself for fourteen days, he is branded on the forehead
with a hot iron, and remains a slave for the whole of
his life ; if he runs away a second time, he is put to
death. Sometimes, says More, you might see a score
of thieves hung on the same gibbet. In one year 1
forty persons were put to death in the county of
Somerset alone, and in each county there were three or
four hundred vagabonds who would sometimes gather
together and rob in armed bands of sixty at a time.
Follow the whole of this history closely, the fires of
Mary, the pillories of Elizabeth, and it is plain that
the moral tone of the land, like its physical condition,
is harsh by comparison with other countries. They
have no relish in their enjoyments, as in Italy ; what
is called Merry England is England given up to animal
spirits, a coarse animation produced by abundant feed-
ing, continued prosperity, courage, and self-reliance ;
voluptuousness does not exist in this climate and' this
race. Mingled with the beautiful popular beliefs, the
lugubrious dreams and the cruel nightmare of witchcraft
make their appearance. Bishop Jewell, preaching
before the queen, tells her that witches and sorcerers
within these few last years are marvellously increased
Some ministers assert

" That they have had in their parish at one instant, xvij or
xviij witches; meaning such as could worke miracles super-
naturallie ; that they work spells by which men pine away even
unto death, their colour fadeth, their flesh rotteth, their speech
is benumbed, their senses are bereft ; that instructed by the
devil, they make ointments of the bowels and members of child-
ren, whereby they ride in the aire, and accomplish all their de-
sires. When a child is not baptized, or defended by the sign of
1 In 15*0.

378 THE KENAISSANCE. BOOK n

the cross, then the witches catch them from their mothers sides
in the night . . . kill them ... or after buriall steale them
out of their graves, and seeth them in a caldron, untill their
flesh be made potable. ... It is an infallible rule, that everie
fortnight, or at the least everie moneth, each witch must kill
one child at the least for hir part."

Here was something to make the teeth chatter with
fright. Add to this revolting and absurd descriptions,
wretched tomfooleries, details about the infernal caul-
dron, all the nastinesses which could haunt the trite
imagination of a hideous and drivelling old woman,
and you have the spectacles, provided by Middleton
and Shakspeare, and which suit the sentiments of the
age and the national humour. The fundamental gloom
pierces through the glow and rapture of poetry. Mourn-
ful legends have multiplied ; every churchyard has its
ghost; wherever a man has been murdered his spirit
appears. Many people dare not leave their village
after sunset. In the evening, before bed-time, men
talk of the coach which is seen drawn by headless
horses, with headless postilions and coachmen, or of
unhappy spirits who, compelled to inhabit the plain,
under the sharp north-east wind, pray for the shelter
of a hedge or a valley. They dream terribly of death :

" To die and go we know not where ;
To lie in cold obstruction and to rot ;
This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod ; and the delighted spirit
To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ice :
To be imprison'd in the viewless winds,
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendent world ; or to be worse than worst

OHAP. ii. THE THEATRE. 379

Of those that lawless and incertain thought
Imagine howling : 'tis too horrible ! " l

The greatest speak with a sad resignation of the infinite
obscurity which embraces our poor, short, glimmering
life, our life, which is but a troubled dream;2 the sad
state of humanity, which is but passion, madness, and
sorrow ; the human being who is himself, perhaps, but
a vain phantom, a grievous sick man's dream. In
their eyes we roll down a fatal slope, where chance
dashes us one against the other, and the inner destiny
which urges us onward, only shatters after it has blinded
us. And at the end of all is "the silent grave, no
conversation, no joyful tread of friends, no voice of
lovers, no careful father's counsel; nothing's heard, nor
nothing is, but all oblivion, dust, and endless darkness." 3
If yet there were nothing. " To die, to sleep ; to sleep,
perchance to dream." To dream sadly, to fall into a
nightmare like the nightmare of life, like that in which
we are struggling and crying to-day, gasping with
hoarse tin-oat ! — this is their idea of man and of exist-
ence, the national idea, which fills the stage with
calamities and despair, which makes a display of tortures
and massacres, which abounds in madness and crime,
which holds up death as the issue throughout. A
threatening and sombre fog veils their mind like their
sky, and joy, like the sun, only appears in its full force
now and then. They are different from the Latin race,

1 Shakspeare, Measure for Measure, Act iii. 1. See also The Tem-
pest, Hamlet, Macbeth.

2 "We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep." — Tempest, iv. 1.
s Beaumont and Fletcher, Thierry and Theodvret. Act iv. 1.

380 THE RENAISSANCE. BOOK 11.

«*-

and in the common Renaissance they are regenerated
otherwise than the Latin races. The free and full
development of pure nature which, in Greece and Italy,
ends in the painting of beauty and happy energy, ends
here in the painting of ferocious energy, agony, and
death.

IV.

Thus was this theatre produced ; a theatre unique in
history, like the admirable and fleeting epoch from which
it sprang, the work and the picture of this young world,
as natural, as unshackled, and as tragic as itself. When
an original and national drama springs up, the poets who
establish it, carry in themselves the sentiments which
it represents. They display better than other men the
feelings of the public, because those feelings are stronger
in them than in other men. The passions which sur-
round them, break forth in their heart with a harshei
or a juster cry, and hence their voices become the voices
of all. Chivalric and Catholic Spain had her interpre-
ters in her enthusiasts and her Don Quixotes : in
Calderon, first a soldier, afterwards a priest ; in Lope
de Vega, a volunteer at fifteen, a passionate lover, a
wandering duellist, a soldier of the Armada, finally, a
priest and familiar of the Holy Office ; so full of fervour
that he fasts till he is exhausted, faints with emotion
while singing mass, and in his flagellations stains the
walls of his cell with blood. Calm and noble Greece
had in her principal tragic poet one of the most accom-
plished and fortunate of her sons : l Sophocles, first in
song and palaestra ; who at fifteen sang, unclad, the
paean before the trophy of Salamis, and who afterwards,

5* fr iraicrl Kal trepl iraXaiffrpav Kal fJiovfftKrjv,
riowv l<rTf<t>av66r) . . . <J>iXa0i7»'ai6TftTos Kal 0eo0iX7?s.— Scholiast.

CHAP. ii. THE THEATRE. 381

as ambassador, general, ever loving the gods and im-
passioned for his state, presented, in his life as in his
works, the spectacle of the incomparable harmony which
made the beauty of the ancient world, and which the
modern world will never more attain to. Eloquent and
worldly France, in the age which carried the art of good
manners and conversation to its highest pitch, finds, to
write her oratorical tragedies and to paint her drawing-
room passions, the most able craftsman of words, Eacine,
a courtier, a man of the world ; the most capable, by the
delicacy of his tact and the adaptation of his style, of
making men of the world and courtiers speak. So in
England the poets are in harmony with their works.
Almost all are Bohemians ; they sprung from the
people,1 were educated, and usually studied at Oxford
or Cambridge, but they were poor, so that their educa-
tion contrasts with their condition. Ben Jonson is the
step-son of a bricklayer, and himself a bricklayer ;
Marlowe is the son of a shoemaker ; Shakspeare of a
wool merchant; Massinger of a servant of a noble
family.2 They live as they can, get into debt, write for
their bread, go on the stage. Peele, Lodge, Marlowe,
Ben Jonson, Shakspeare, Hey wood, are actors ; most of
the details which we have of their lives are taken from
(he journal of Henslowe, a retired pawnbroker, later a
money-lender and manager of a theatre, who gives them
work, advances money to them, receives their manu-
scripts or their wardrobes as security. For a play he

1 Except Beaumont and Fletcher.

2 Hartley Coleridge, in his Introduction to the Dramatic Works oj
Massinger and Ford, says of Massiuger's father : "We are not certified
of the situation which he held in the noble household (Earl of Pem-
broke), but we may be sure that it was neither menial nor mean.
Service in those days was not derogatory to gentle birth."— TB.

382 THE RENAISSANCE. BOOK n.

gives seven or eight pounds ; after the year 1600 prices
rise, and reach as high as twenty or twenty-five pounds.
It is clear that, even after this increase, the trade of
author scarcely brings in bread. In order to earn
money, it was necessary, like Shakspeare, to become a
manager, to try to have a share in the property of a
theatre; but such success is rare, and the life which
they lead, a life of actors and artists, improvident,
full of excess, lost amid debauchery and acts of vio-
lence, amidst women of evil fame, in contact with
young profligates, among the temptations of misery",
imagination and licence, generally leads them to ex-
haustion, poverty, and death. Men received enjoyment
from them, but neglected and despised them. One
actor, for a political allusion, was sent to prison, and
only just escaped losing his ears; great men, men in
office, abused them like servants. Heywood, who
played almost every day, bound himself, in addition,
to write a sheet daily, for several years composes at
haphazard in taverns, labours and sweats like a true
literary hack, and dies leaving two hundred and twenty
pieces, of which most are lost. Kyd, one of the earliest
in date, died in misery. Shirley, one of the last, at the
end of his career, was obliged to become once more a
schoolmaster. Massinger dies unknown ; and in the
parish register we find only this sad mention of him :
" Philip Massinger, a stranger." A few months after
the death of Middleton, his widow was obliged to ask
alms of the City, because he had left nothing. Imagin-
ation, as Drummond said of Ben Jonson, oppressed their
reason ; it is the common failing of poets. They wish
to enjoy, and give themselves wholly up to enjoyment ;
their mood, their heart governs them ; in their life, as

CHAP. ii. THE THEATRE. 383

in their works, impulses are irresistible ; desire comes
suddenly, like a wave, drowning reason, resistance —
often even giving neither reason nor resistance time to
show themselves.1 Many are roysterers, sad roysterers
of the same sort, such as Musset and Murger, who give
themselves up to every passion, and " drown their
sorrows in the bowl ; " capable of the purest and most
poetic dreams, of the most delicate and touching tender-
ness, and who yet can only undermine their health and
mar their fame. Such are Nash, Decker, and Greene ;
Nash, a fantastic satirist, who abused his talent, and
conspired like a prodigal against good fortune ; Decker,
who passed three years in the King's Bench prison ;
Greene, above all, a pleasing wit, copious, graceful, who
took a delight in destroying himself, publicly with tears
confessing his vices,2 and the next moment plunging
into them again. These are mere androgynes, true
courtesans, in manners, body, and heart. Quitting
Cambridge, "with good fellows as free-living as himself,"
Greene had travelled over Spain, Italy, " in which places
he sawe and practizde such villainie as is abhominable
to declare." You see the poor man is candid, not spar-
ing himself ; he is natural ; passionate in everything,
repentance or otherwise; above all of ever-varying mood ;
made for self-contradiction ; not self-correction. On his
return he became, in London, a supporter of taverns,

1 See, amongst others, The Woman Killed with Kindness, by Hey-
wood. Mrs. Frankfort, so upright of heart, accepts Wendoll at his
Grst offer. Sir Francis Acton, at the sight of her whom he wishes to
dishonour, and whom he hates, falls "into an ecstasy," and dreams of
nothing save marriage. Compare the sudden transport of Juliet,
Romeo, Macbeth, Miranda, etc. ; the counsel of Prospero to Fernando,
when he leaves him alone for a moment with Miranda.

2 Compare La Vie de Boh£me and Les Nuits d' Hirer, by Murger ;
Confession d'un Enfant du Siecle, by A. de Musset.

384 THE RENAISSANCE. BOOK 11,

a haunter of evil places. In his Gfroatsworth of Wit
bought with a Million of Repentance he says :

" I was dround in pride, whoredom was my daily exercise, and
gluttony with drunkenness was my onely delight. . . . After I
had wholly betaken me to the penning of plaies (which was my
continuall exercise) I was so far from calling upon God that I
sildome thought on God, but tooke such delight in swearing and
blaspheming the name of God that none could thinke otherwise
of me than that I was the child of perdition. These vanities
and other trifling pamphlets I penned of love and vaine fantasies
was my chiefest stay of living ; and for those my vaine discourses
I was beloved of the more vainer sort of people, who being my
continuall companions, came still to my lodging, and there would
continue quaffing, carowsing, and surfeting with me all the day
long. ... If I may have my disire while I live I am satisfied ;
let me shift after death as I may. . . . ' Hell ! ' quoth I ;
' what talke you of hell to me 1 I know if I once come there
I shall have the company of better men than myselfe ; I shall
also meete with some madde knaves in that place, and so long as
I shall not sit there alone, my care is the lesse. . . . If I feared
the judges of the bench no more than I dread the judgments of
God I would before I slept dive into one carles bagges or other,
and make merrie with the shelles I found in them so long as they
would last.' "

A little later he is seized with remorse, marries, depicts
in delicious verse the regularity and calm of an upright
life ; then returns to London, spends his property and
his wife's fortune with " a sorry ragged queane/' in the
company of ruffians, pimps, sharpers, courtesans ; drink-
ing, blaspheming, wearing himself out by sleepless
nights and orgies ; writing for bread, sometimes amid
the brawling and effluvia of his wretched lodging,
lighting upon thoughts of adoration and love, worthy

CHAP. ii. THE THEATKE. 385

of Eolla ; 1 very often disgusted with himself, seized
with a fit of weeping between two merry bouts, and writ-
ing little pieces to accuse himself, to regret his wife, to
convert his comrades, or to warn young people against
the tricks of prostitutes and swindlers. He was soon
worn out by this kind of life ; six years were enough to
exhaust him. An indigestion arising from Khenish
wine and pickled herrings finished him. If it had not
been for his landlady, who succoured him, he " would
have perished in the streets." He lasted a little longer,
and then his light went out ; now and then he begged
her " pittifully for a penny pott of malmesie ;" he was
covered with lice, he had but one shirt, and when his
own was "a washing," he was obliged to borrow her
husband's. "His doublet and hose and sword were
sold for three shilling's," and the poor folks paid the
cost of his burial, four shillings for the winding-sheet,
and six and fourpence for the burial.

In such low places, on such dunghills, amid such
excesses and violence, dramatic genius forced its way,
and amongst others, that of the first, of the most power-
ful, of the true founder of the dramatic school, Christo-
pher Marlowe.

Marlowe was an ill-regulated, dissolute, outrageously
vehement and audacious spirit, but grand and sombre,
with the genuine poetic frenzy; pagan moreover, and
rebellious in manners and creed. In this universal
return to the senses, and in this impulse of natural
forces which brought on the Eenaissance, the corporeal
instincts and the ideas which hallow them, break forth
impetuously. Marlowe, like Greene, like Kett,2 is a

1 The hero of one of Alfred de Musset's poems. — TR.

3 Burnt in 1589.
VOL. I. 2 C

386 THE RENAISSANCE. BOOK n.

sceptic, denies God and Christ, blasphemes the Trinity,
declares Moses "a juggler," Christ more worthy of
death than Barabbas, says that " yf he wer to write a
new religion, he wolde undertake both a more excellent
and more admirable methode," and " almost in every
company he commeth, perswadeth men to Athiesme." ]
Such were the rages, the rashnesses, the excesses which
liberty of thought gave rise to in these new minds,
who for the first time, after so many centuries, dared
to walk unfettered. From his father's shop, crowded
with children, from the straps and awls, he found him-
self studying at Cambridge, probably through the
patronage of a great man, and on his return to London,
in want, amid the licence of the green-room, the low
houses and taverns, his head was in a ferment, and his
passions became excited. He turned actor ; but having
broken his leg in a scene of debauchery, he remained
lame, and could no longer appear on the boards. He
openly avowed his infidelity, and a prosecution was
begun, which, if time had not failed, would probably
have brought him to the stake. He made love to a
drab, and in trying to stab his rival, his hand was
turned, so that his own blade entered his eye and his
brain, and he died, cursing and blaspheming. He was
only thirty years old.

Think what poetry could emanate from a life so
passionate, and occupied in such a manner ! First,
exaggerated declamation, heaps of murder, atrocities, a
pompous and furious display of tragedy bespattered
with blood, and passions raised to a pitch of madness.
All the foundations of the English stage, Ferrex and

1 I have used Marlowe's Works, ed. Dyce, 3. vols., 1850. Append.
L voL 3.— TE.

OHAP. n. THE THEATRE. 387

Porrex, Cambyses, Hieronymo, even the Pericles of Shak-
speare, reach the same height of extravagance, magnilo-
quence, and horror.1 It is the first outbreak of youth.
Recall Schiller's Bobbers, and how modern democracy has
recognised for the first time its picture in the metaphors
and cries of Charles Moor.2 So here the characters
struggle and roar, stamp on the earth, gnash their
teeth, shake their fists against heaven. The trumpets
sound, the drums beat, coats of mail file past, armies
clash, men stab each other, or themselves ; speeches
are full of gigantic threats and lyrical figures ; 3 kings
die, straining a bass voice; "now doth ghastly death
with greedy talons gripe my bleeding heart, and like a
harpy tires on my life." The hero in Tamburlaine the.
Great 4 is seated on a chariot drawn by chained kings ;

1 See especially Titus Andronicus, attributed to Shakspeare : there
are parricides, mothers whom they cause to eat their children, a young
girl who appears on the stage violated, with her tongue and hands cut
off.

2 The chief character in Schiller's Robbersy a virtuous brigand and
redresser of wrongs. — TR.

3 For in a field, whose superficies
Is cover'd with a liquid purple veil,
And sprinkled with the brains of slaughter'd men,
My royal chair of state shall be advanc'd ;
And he that means to place himself therein,
Must armed wade up to the chin in blood. . . .
And I would strive to swim through pools of blood,
Or make a bridge of murder'd carcasses,
Whose arches should be fram'd with bones of Turks,
Ere 1 would lose the title of a king.

Tamburlaine, part ii. i. 3.

4 The editor of Marlowe's Works, Pickering, 1826, says in his
Introduction : " Both the matter and style of Tamburlaine, however,
differ materially from Marlowe's other compositions, and doubts have
more than once been suggested as to whether the play was properly
assigned to him. We think that Marlowe did not write it." Dyce is
of a contrary opinion. — TK.

388 THE RENAISSANCE. BOOK it.

he burns towns, drowns women and children, puts men to
the sword, and finally, seized with an inscrutable sick-
ness, raves in monstrous outcries against the gods,
whose hands afflict his soul, and whom he would fain
dethrone. There already is the picture of senseless
pride, of blind and murderous rage, which passing
through many devastations, at last arms against heaven
itself. The overflowing of savage and immoderate
instinct produces this mighty sounding verse, this
prodigality of carnage, this display of splendours and
exaggerated colours, this railing of demoniacal passions,
this audacity of grand impiety. If in the dramas
which succeed it, The Massacre at Paris, The Jew of
Malta, the bombast decreases, the violence remains.
Barabas the Jew maddened with hate, is thenceforth
no longer human ; lie has been treated by the Christians
like a beast, and he hates them like a beast. He
advises his servant Ithamore in the following words :

" Hast thou no trade 1 then listen to iny words,
And I will teach thee that shall stick by thee :
First, be thou void of these affections,
Compassion, love, vain hope, and heartless fear ;
Be mov'd at nothing, see thou pity none,
But to thyself smile when the Christians moan.
... I walk abroad a-nights,
And kill sick people groaning under walls ;
Sometimes I go about and poison wells. . . .
Being young, I studied physic, and began
To practise first upon the Italian •
There I enrich'd the priests with burials,
And always kept the sexton's arms in ure
With digging graves and ringing dead men's knells. . . ,
I fill'd the jails with bankrouts in a year,
And with young orphans planted hospitals ;

CHAP. n. THE THEATKE. 389

And every moon made some or other mad,
And iio\v and then one hang himself for grief,
Pinning upon his breast a long great scroll
How I with interest tormented him." l

All these cruelties he boasts of and chuckles over, like
a demon who rejoices in being a good executioner, and
plunges his victims in the very extremity of anguish.
His daughter has two Christian suitors ; and by forged
letters he causes them to slay each other. In despair
she takes the veil, and to avenge himself he poisons his
daughter and the whole convent. Two friars wish to
denounce him, then to convert him ; he strangles the
first, and jokes with his slave Ithamore, a cut-throat by
profession, who loves his trade, rubs his hands with joy,
and says :

" Pull amain,

" Tis neatly done, sir ; here's no print at all.
So, let him lean upon his staff ; excellent ! he stands as if he

were begging of bacon." '2

" 0 mistress, I have the bravest, gravest, secret, subtle, bottle-
nosed, knave to my master, that ever gentleman had."3

The second friar comes up, and they accuse him of the
murder :

" Barabas. Heaven bless me ! what, a friar a murderer !
When shall you see a Jew commit the like ?

Ithamore. Why, a Turk could ha' done no more.

Bar. To-morrow is the sessions ; you shall to it —
Come Ithamore, let's help to take him hence.

Friar. Villains, I am a sacred person ; touch me not

Bar. The law shall touch you ; we'll but lead you, we :
'Las, I could weep at your calamity ! " 4

1 Marlowe's The Jew of Malta, ii. p. 275 et passiin.
3 Ibid. iv. p. 311. 3 Ibid. iii. p. 291. « Ibid. iv. p. 313.

390 THE RENAISSANCE. BOOK n.

We have also two other poisonings, an infernal machine
to blow up the Turkish garrison, a plot to cast the
Turkish commander into a well. Barabas falls into
it himself, and dies in the hot cauldron,1 howling,
hardened, remorseless, having but one regret, that he
had not done evil enough. These are the ferocities of
the middle-age ; we might find them to this day among
the companions of Ali Pacha, among the pirates of the
Archipelago; we retain pictures of them in the paintings
of the fifteenth century, which represent a king with his
court, seated calmly round a living man who is being
flayed ; in the midst the flayer on his knees is working
conscientiously, very careful not to spoil the skin.2

All this is pretty strong, you will say; these people
kill too readily, and too quickly. It is on this very
account that the painting is a true one. For the
specialty of the men of the time, as of Marlowe's cha-
racters, is the abrupt commission of a deed ; they are
children, robust children. As a horse kicks out instead
of speaking, so they pull out their knives instead of
asking an explanation. ~ Nowadays we hardly know
what nature is ; instead of observing it we still retain
the benevolent prejudices of the eighteenth century; we
only see it humanised by two centuries of culture, and
we take its acquired calm for an innate moderation.
The foundations of the natural man are irresistible
impulses, passions, desires, greeds ; all blind. He sees
a woman,3 thinks her beautiful ; suddenly he rushes
towards her ; people try to restrain him, he kills these

1 Up to this time, in England, poisoners were cast into a boiling
cauldron. 2 In the Museum of Ghent.

3 See in the Jew of Malta the seduction of Ithumore, by Bellamira,
a. rough, but truly admirable picture.

CHAP. ii. THE THEATRE. 391

people, gluts his passion, then thinks no more of it, save
when at times a vague picture of a moving lake of
blood crosses his brain and makes him gloomy. Sudden
and extreme resolves are confused in his mind with
desire ; barely planned, the thing is done ; the wide
interval which a Frenchman places between the idea of
an action and the action itself is not to be found here. l
Barabas conceived murders, and straightway murders
were accomplished ; there is no deliberation, no pricks
of conscience ; that is how he Commits a score of them ;
his daughter leaves him, he becomes unnatural, and
poisons her; his confidential servant betrays him, he
disguises himself, and poisons him. Eage seizes these
men like a fit, and then they are forced to kill. Ben-
venuto Cellini relates how, being offended, he tried to
restrain himself, but was nearly suffocated; and that
in order to cure himself, he rushed with his dagger upon
his opponent. So, in Edward II., the nobles immediately
appeal to arms ; all is excessive and unforeseen : be-
tween two replies the heart is turned upside down, trans-
ported to the extremes of hate or tenderness. Edward,
seeing his favourite Gaveston again, pours out before
him his treasure, casts his dignities at his feet, gives
him his seal, himself, and, on a threat from the Bishop
of Coventiy, suddenly cries :

" Throw off his golden mitre, rend his stole,
And in the channel christen him anew." 2

1 Nothing could be falser than the hesitation and arguments of Schil-
ler's William Tell : for a contrast, see Goethe's Goetz von Berlichingen.
In 1377, Wiclif pleaded in St. Paul's before the Bishop of London, and
that raised a quarrel. The Duke of Lancaster, Wiclif s protector,
" threatened to drag the bishop out of the church by the hair ;" and
next day the furious crowd sacked the duke's palace.

2 Marlowe, Edward the Second, i. p. 173.

392 THE RENAISSANCE. BOOK n

Then, when the queen supplicates :

" Fawn not on me, French strumpet ! get thee gone. . . .
Speak not unto her : let her droop and pine."1

Furies and hatreds clash together like horsemen in
battle. The Earl of Lancaster draws his sword on
Gaveston to slay him, before the king; Mortimer
wounds Gaveston. These powerful loud voices growl ;
the noblemen will not even let a dog approach the
prince, and rob them of • their rank. Lancaster says of
Gaveston :

" .... He comes not back,
Unless the sea cast up his shipwrack'd body.

Warwick And to behold so sweet a sight as that,
There's none here but would run his horse to death." 2

They have seized Gaveston, and intend to hang him " at
a bough ;" they refuse to let him speak a single minute
with the king. In vain they are entreated ; when they
do at last consent, they are sorry for it; it is a prey
they want immediately, and Warwick, seizing him by
force, " strake off his head in a trench." Those are the
men of the middle-age. They have the fierceness, the
tenacity, the pride of big, well-fed, thorough-bred bull-
dogs. It is this sternness and impetuosity of primitive
passions which produced the Wars of the Eoses, and for
thirty years drove the nobles on each other's swords and
to the block.

What is there beyond all these frenzies and gluttings
of blood? The idea of crushing necessity and inevit-
able ruin in which everything sinks and comes to an
end. Mortimer, brought to the block, says with a
smile :

1 Marlowe, Edward the Second, p. 186. 2 Ibvl. p. 188.

CHAP. ii. THE THEATRE. 393

" Base Fortune, now I see, that in thy wheel
There is a point, to which when men aspire,
They tumble headlong down : that point I touched,
And, seeing there was no place to mount up higher,
Why should I grieve at my declining fall 1 —
Farewell, fair queen ; weep not for Mortimer,
That scorns the world, and, as a traveller,
Goes to discover countries yet unknown." l

Weigh well these grand words ; they are a cry from the
heart, the profound confession of Marlowe, as also of
Byron, and of the old sea-kings. The northern pagan-
ism is fully expressed in this heroic and mournful sigh :
it is thus they imagine the world so long as they remain
on the outside of Christianity, or as soon as they quit
it. Thus, when men see in life, as they did, notliing but
a battle of unchecked passions, and in death but a
gloomy sleep, perhaps filled with mournful dreams, there
is no other supreme good but a day of enjoyment and
victory. They glut themselves, shutting their eyes to
the issue, except that they may be swallowed up on the
morrow. That is the master-thought of Doctor Faustus,
the greatest of Marlowe's dramas : to satisfy his soul,
no matter at what price, or with what results :

" A sound magician is a mighty god. . . .
How am I glutted with conceit of this ! . . .
I'll have them fly to India for gold,
Ransack the ocean for orient pearl. . .
I'll have them read me strange philosophy,
And tell the secrets of all foreign kings ;
I'll have them wall all Germany with brass,
And make swift Rhine circle fair Wertenberg. . . ,

1 Edward the Second, last scene, p. 288.

394 THE RENAISSANCE. BOOK n.

Like lions shall they guard us when we please ;
Like Almain ratters with their horsemen's staves,
Or Lapland giants, trotting by our sides ;
Sometimes like women, or unwedded maids,
Shadowing more beauty in their airy brows
Than have the white breasts of the queen of love." l

What brilliant dreams, what desires, what vast or
voluptuous wishes, worthy of a Roman Csesar or an
eastern poet, eddy in this teeming brain ! To satiate
them, to obtain four-and-twenty years of power, Faustus
gives his soul, without fear, without need of temptation,
at the first outset, voluntarily, so sharp is the prick
within :

" Had I as many souls as there be stars,
I'd give them all for Mephistophilis.
By him I'll be great emperor of the world,
And make a bridge thorough the moving air. . . .
Why shouldst thou not ? Is not thy soul thine own ] " 2

And with that he gives himself full swing : he wants
to know everything, to bave everything; a book in
which he can behold all herbs and trees w^hich grow upon
the earth ; another in which shall be drawn all the con-
stellations and planets ; another which shall bring him
gold when he wills it, and " the fairest courtezans :"
another which summons "men in armour" ready to
execute his commands, and which holds "whirlwinds,
tempests, thunder and lightning " chained at his disposal.
He is like a child, he stretches out his hands for every-
thing shining ; then grieves to think of hell, then lets
himself be diverted by shows :

1 Marlowe, Doctor Faustiw, i. p. 9, et pasrim.
3 find. pp. 22, 29.

CHAP. n. THE THEATRE. 395

" Faustus. 0 this feeds my soul !
Lucifer. Tut, Faustus, in hell is all manner of delight.
Faustus. Oh, might I see hell, and return again,
How happy were I then ! " . . . ,l

He is conducted, being invisible, over the whole world :
lastly to Eome, amongst the ceremonies of the Pope's
court. Like a schoolboy during a holiday, he has in-
satiable eyes, he forgets everything before a pageant, he
amuses himself in playing tricks, in giving the Pope a
box on the ear, in beating the monks, in performing
magic tricks before princes, finally in drinking, feasting,
filling his belly, deadening his thoughts. In his trans-
port he becomes an atheist, and says there is no hell,
that those are " old wives ' tales." Then suddenly the
sad idea knocks at the gates of his brain.
" I will renounce this magic, and repent . . i

My heart's so harden'd, I cannot repent :

Scarce can I name salvation, faith, or heaven,

But fearful echoes thunder in mine ears,
' Faustus, thou art damn'd ! ' then swords, and knives,

Poison, guns, halters, and euvenom'd steel

Are laid before me to despatch myself ;

And long ere this I should have done the deed,

Had not sweet pleasure conquer'd deep despair.

Have not I made blind Homer sing to me

Of Alexander's love and (Enon's death ?

And hath not he, that built the walls of Thebes

With ravishing sound of his melodious harp,

Made music with my Mephistophilis 1

Why should I die, then, or basely despair ?

I am resolv'd ; Faustus shall ne'er repent. — •

Come Mephistophilis, let us dispute again,

And argue of divine astrology.

1 Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, i. p. 43.

396 THE RENAISSANCE. BOOK IL

Tell me, are there many heavens above the moon ?
Are all celestial bodies but one globe,
As is the substance of this centric earth 1 . . ." l
" One thing ... let me crave of thee
To glut the longing of rny heart's desire. . . .
Was this the face that launclrd a thousand ships,
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium ?
Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss !
Her lips suck forth my soul : see, where it flies ! —
Come, Helen, come, give me my soul again.
Here will I dwell, for heaven is in these lips,
And all is dross that is not Helena. . . .
0 thou art fairer than the evening air
Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars ! " 2

" Oh, my God, I would weep ! but the devil draws in
my tears. Gush forth blood, instead of tears ! yea, life
and soul ! Oh, he stays my tongue ! I would lift up
my hands ; but see, they hold them, they hold them ;
Lucifer and Mephistophilis." . . . 3

" Ah, Faustus,

Now hast thou but one bare hour to live,
And then thou must be damn'd perpetually !
Stand still, you ever-moving spheres of heaven,
That time may cease, and midnight never come. . . .
The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike,
The devil will come, and Faustus must be damn'd.
Oh, I'll leap up to my God ! — Who pulls me down ? —
See, see, where Christ's blood streams in the firmament !
One drop would save my soul, half a drop : ah, my Christ,
Ah, rend not my heart for naming of my Christ,
Yet will I call on him. . . .
Ah, half the hour is past ! 'twill all be past anon. . . .

1 Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, p. 37. 2 Fold. p. 75. 8 Ibid. p. 73.

CHAP. ii. THE THEATRE. Si) 7

Let Faustus live in hell a thousand years,

A hundred thousand, and at last be sav'd. . . .

It strikes, it strikes. . . .

Oh soul, be chang'd into little water-drops,

And fall into the ocean, ne'er be found ! " l

There is the living, struggling, natural, personal man,
not the philosophic type which Goethe has created, but
a primitive and genuine man, hot-headed, fiery, the slave
of his passions, the sport of his dreams, wholly engrossed
in the present, moulded by his lusts, contradictions, and
follies, who amidst noise and starts, cries of pleasure
and anguish, rolls, knowing it and willing it, down the
slope and crags of his precipice. The whole English
drama is here, as a plant in its seed, and Marlowe is to
Shakspeare what Perugino was to Eaphael.

V.

Gradually art is being formed ; and toward the close
of the century it is complete. Shakspeare, Beaumont,
Fletcher, Ben Jonson, Webster, Massinger, Ford, Middle-
ton, Heywood, appear together, or close upon each other,
a new and favoured generation, flourishing largely in the
soil fertilised by the efforts of the generation which
preceded them. Thenceforth the scenes are developed
and assume consistency; the characters cease to move
all of a piece, the drama is no longer like a piece of
statuary. The poet who a little while ago knew only
how to strike or kill, introduces now a sequence of
situation and a rationale in intrigue. He begins to
prepare the way for sentiments, to forewarn us of events,
to combine effects, and we find a theatre at last, the

1 Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, p. 80.

398 THE RENAISSANCE. BOOK IL

most complete, the most life-like, and also the most
strange that ever existed.

We must follow its formation, and regard the drama
when it was formed, that is, in the minds of its authors.
What was going on in these minds? What sorts of
ideas were bom there, and how were they born ? In
the first place, they see the event, whatever it be, and
they see it as it is ; I mean that they have it within
themselves, with its persons and details, beautiful and
ugly, even dull and grotesque. If it is a trial, the judge
is there, in their minds, in his place, with his physi-
ognomy and his warts ; the plaintiff in another place,
with his spectacles and brief-bag ; the accused is
opposite, stooping and remorseful ; each with his friends,
cobblers, or lords ; then the buzzing crowd behind, all
with their grinning faces, their bewildered or kindling
eyes.1 It is a genuine trial which they imagine, a trial
like those they have seen before the justice, where they
screamed or shouted as witnesses or interested parties,
with their quibbling terms, their pros and cons, the scrib-
blings, the sharp voices of the counsel, the stamping of
feet, the crowding, the smell of their fellow-men, and
so forth. The endless myriads of circumstances which
accompany and influence every event, crowd round that
event in their heads, and not merely the externals, that
is, the visible and picturesque traits, the details of
colour and costume, but also, and chiefly, the internals,
that is, the motions of anger and joy, the secret tumult
of the soul, the ebb and flow of ideas and passions which
are expressed by the countenance, swell the veins, make
a man to grind his teeth, to clench his fists, which urge

1 See the trial of Vittoria Corombona, of Virginia in Webster, of
Coriolanus and Julius C»sar in Shakspeare.

CHAP. ii. THE THEATRE. 399

him on or restrain him. They see all the details, the
tides that sway a man, one from without, another from
within, one through another, one within another, both
together without faltering and without ceasing. And
what is this insight but sympathy, an imitative sym-
pathy, which puts us in another's place, which carries
over their agitations to our own breasts, which makes
our life a little world, able to reproduce the great one
in abstract ? Like the characters they imagine, poets
and spectators make gestures, raise their voices, act.
No speech or story can show their inner mood, but it
is the scenic effect which can manifest it. As some
men invent a language for their ideas, so these act and
mimic them ; theatrical imitation and figured repre-
sentation is their genuine speech : all other expression,
the lyrical song of ^Eschylus, the reflective symbolism
of Goethe, the oratorical development of Eacine, would
be impossible for them. Involuntarily, instantaneously,
without forecast, they cut life into scenes, and carry it
piecemeal on the boards ; this goes so far, that often a
mere character becomes an actor,1 playing a part within
a part ; the scenic faculty is the natural form of their
mind. Beneath the effort of this instinct, all the acces-
sory parts of the drama come before the footlights and
expand before our eyes. A battle has been fought;
instead of relating it, they bring it before the public,
trumpets and drums, pushing crowds, slaughtering com-
batants. A shipwreck happens ; straightway the ship
is before the spectator, with the sailors' oaths, the
technical orders of the pilot. Of all the details of

1 Falstaff in Shakspeare ; the queen in London, by Greene and
Decker ; Rosalind in Shakspeare.

400 THE RENAISSANCE. BOOK u.

human life,1 tavern-racket and statesmen's councils,
scullion's talk and court processions, domestic tender-
ness and pandering, — none is too small or too lofty :
these things exist in life — let them exist on the stage,
each in full, in the rough, atrocious, or absurd, just as
they are, no matter how. Neither in Greece, nor Italy,
nor Spain, nor Trance, has an art been seen which tried
so boldly to express the soul, and its innermost depths
- — the truth, and the whole truth.

How did they succeed, and what is this new art
which tramples on all ordinary rules ? It is an art for
all that, since it is natural ; a great art, since it embraces
more things, and that more deeply than others do, like
the art of Rembrandt and Rubens ; but like theirs, it is
a Teutonic art, and one whose every step is in con-
trast with those of classical art. What the Greeks
and Romans, the originators of the latter, sought in
everything, was charm and order. Monuments, statues,
and paintings, the theatre, eloquence and poetry, from
Sophocles to Racine, they shaped all their work in
the same mould, and attained beauty by the same
method. In the infinite entanglement and complexity
of things, they grasped a small number of simple ideas,
which they embraced in a small number of simple
representations, so that the vast confused vegetation of
life is presented to the mind from that time forth,
pruned and reduced, and perhaps easily embraced
at a single glance. A square of walls with rows of
columns all alike ; a symmetrical group of draped or
undraped forms ; a young man standing up and raising
one arm ; a wounded warrior who will not return to the

1 In Webster's Diichess of Malfi there is an admirable accouche-
ment scene.

CIIAP. ii. THE THEATRE. 401

camp, though they beseech him : this, in their noblest
epoch, was their architecture, their painting, their
sculpture, and their theatre. No poetry but a few
sentiments not very intricate, always natural, not toned
down, intelligible to all ; no eloquence but a continuous
argument, a limited vocabulary, the loftiest ideas brought
down to their sensible origin, so that children can under-
stand such eloquence and feel such poetry ; and in this
sense they are classical.1 In the hands of Frenchmen,
the last inheritors of the simple art, these great legacies
of antiquity undergo no change. If poetic genius is
less, the structure of mind has not altered. Racine
puts on the stage a sole action, whose details he
adjusts, and whose course he regulates ; no incident,
nothing unforeseen, no appendices or incongruities ; no
secondary intrigue. The subordinate parts are effaced ;
at the most four or five principal characters, the fewest
possible ; the rest, reduced to the condition of confidants,
take the tone of their masters, and merely reply to them.
All the scenes are connected, and flow insensibly one
into the other; and every scene, like the entire piece,
has its order and progress. The tragedy stands out
symmetrically and clear in the midst of human life, like
a complete and solitary temple which limns its regular
outline on the luminous azure of the sky. In England
all is different. All that the French call proportion and
fitness is wanting; Englishmen do not trouble them-
selves about them, they do not need them. There is
no unity ; they leap suddenly over twenty years, or

1 This is, in fact, the English view of the French mind, which is
doubtless a refinement, many times refined, of the classical spirit. But
M. Taine has seemingly not taken into account such products as the
Medea on the one hand, and the works of Aristophanes and the Latin
sensualists on the other. — TR.

VOL. I. 2 D

402 THE RENAISSANCE. BOOK 11.

five hundred leagues. There are twenty scenes in an
act — we stumble without preparation from one to the
other, from tragedy to buffoonery; usually it appears
as though the action gained no ground; the different
personages waste their time in conversation, dreaming,
displaying their character. We were moved, anxious
for the issue, and here they bring us in quarrelling
servants, lovers making poetry. Even the dialogue and
speeches, which we would think ought particularly to
be of a regular and continuous flow of engrossing ideas,
remain stagnant, or are scattered in windings and
deviations. At first sight we fancy we are not advanc-
ing, we do not feel at every phrase that we have made
a step. There are none of those solid pleadings, none
of those conclusive discussions, which every moment
add reason to reason, objection to objection ; people
might say that the different personages only knew how
to scold, to repeat themselves, and to mark time. And
the disorder is as great in general as in particular things.
They heap a whole reign, a complete war, an entire novel,
into a drama ; they cut up into scenes an English chro-
nicle or an Italian novel : this is all their art ; the
events matter little ; whatever they are, they accept
them. They have no idea of progressive and individual
action. Two or three actions connected endwise, or
entangled one within another, two or three incomplete
endings badly contrived, and opened up again ; no
machinery but death, scattered right and left and
unforeseen : such is the logic of their method. The
fact is, that our logic, the Latin, fails them. Their mind
does not march by the smooth and straightforward paths
of rhetoric and eloquence. It reaches the same end,
but by other approaches. It is at once more compre-

CHAP. ii. THE THEATRE. 403

hensive and less regular than ours. It demands a
conception more complete, but less consecutive. It
proceeds, not as with us, by a line of uniform steps,
but by sudden leaps and long pauses. It does not rest
satisfied with a simple idea drawn from a complex fact,
but demands the complex fact entire, with its number-
less particularities, its interminable ramifications. It
sees in man not a general passion — ambition, anger, or
love; not a pure quality — happiness, avarice, folly;
but a character, that is, the imprint, wonderfully com-
plicated, which inheritance, temperament, education,
calling, age, society, conversation, habits, have stamped
on every man ; an incommunicable and individual
imprint, which, once stamped in a man, is not found
again in any other. It sees in the hero not only
the hero, but the individual, with his manner of
walking, drinking, swearing, blowing his nose; with
the tone of his voice, whether he is thin or fat ; 1 and
thus plunges to the bottom of things, with every look,
as by a miner's deep shaft. This sunk, it little cares
whether the second shaft be two paces or a hundred
from the first ; enough that it reaches the same depth,
and serves equally well to display the inner and invis-
ible layer. Logic is here from beneath, not from above.
It is the unity of a character which binds the two
actions of the personage, as the unity of an impression
connects the two scenes of a drama. To speak exactly,
the spectator is like a man whom we should lead along a
wall pierced at separate intervals with little windows ;
at every window he catches for an instant a glimpse of
a new landscape, with its million details : the walk over,

1 See Hamlet, Coriolanus, Hotspur. The queen in Hamlet (y. 2)
says : " He (Ham]et)'s fat, and scant of breath."

404 THE RENAISSANCE. BOOK n.

if he is of Latin race and training, he finds a medley of
images jostling in his head, and asks for a map that he
may recollect himself; if he is of German race and
training, he perceives as a whole, by natural concentra-
tion, the wide country which he has only seen piece-
meal. Such a conception, by the multitude of details
which it combines, and by the depth of the vistas
which it embraces, is a half- vision which shakes the
whole soul. What its works are about to show us is.
with what energy, what disdain of contrivance, what
vehemence of truth, it dares to coin and hammer the
human medal ; with what liberty it is able to reproduce
in full prominence worn out characters, and the ex-
treme flights of virgin nature.

VI.

Let us consider the different personages which this
art, so suited to depict real manners, and so apt to
paint the living soul, goes in search of amidst the real
manners and the living souls of its time and country.
They are of two kinds, as befits the nature of the
drama: one which produces terror, the other which
moves to pity ; these graceful and feminine, those
manly and violent. All the differences of sex, all the
extremes of life, all the resources of the stage, are
embraced in this contrast; and if ever there was a
complete contrast, it is here.

The reader must study for himself some of these
pieces, or he will have no idea of the fury into which
the stage is hurled ; force and transport are driven
every instant to the point of atrocity, and further still,
if there be any further. Assassinations, poisonings,
tortures, outcries of madness and rage ; no passion and

CHAP. ii. THE THEATRE. 405

no suffering are too extreme for their energy or their
effort. Anger is with them a madness, ambition a
frenzy, love a delirium. Hippolyto, who has lost his
mistress, says, "Were thine eyes clear as mine, thou
might'st behold her, watching upon yon battlements of
stars, how I observe them." l Aretus, to be avenged
on Valentinian, poisons him after poisoning himself,
and with the death-rattle in his throat, is brought to
his enemy's side, to give him a foretaste of agony.
Queen Brunhalt has panders with her on the stage,
and causes her two sons to slay each other. Death
everywhere; at the close of every play, all the great
people wade in blood : with slaughter and butcheries,
the stage becomes a field of battle or a churchyard.2
Shall I describe a few of these tragedies ? In the
Duke of Milan, Francesco, to avenge his sister, who has
been seduced, wishes to seduce in his turn the Duchess
Marcelia, wife of Sforza, the seducer; he desires her,
he will have her; he says to her, with cries of love
and rage :

" For with this arm I'll swim through seas of blood,
Or make a bridge, arch'd with the bones of men,
But I will grasp my aims in you, my dearest,
Dearest, and best of women ! " 3

For he wishes to strike the duke through her, whether
she lives or dies, if not by dishonour, at least by
murder ; the first is as good as the second, nay better,

1 Middleton, The Honest Whore, part i. iv. 1.

3 Beaumont and Fletcher, Valentinian, Thierry and TJieodoreL See
Massinger's Picture, which resembles Musset's Barberine. Its crudity,
the extraordinary and repulsive energy, will show the difference of the
two ages.

3 Massinger's Works, ed. H. Coleridge, 1859, nuke of Milan, ii. 1.

406 THE RENAISSANCE. BOOK 11.

for so he will do a greater injury. He calumniates
her, and the duke, who adores her, kills her; then,
being undeceived, loses his senses, will not believe
she is dead, has the body brought in, kneels before it,
rages and weeps. He knows now the name of the
traitor, and at the thought of him he swoons or raves :

' I'll follow him to hell, but I will find him,
And there live a fourth Fury to torment him.
Then, for this cursed hand and arm that guided
The wicked steel, I'll have them, joint by joint,
With burning irons sear'd off, which I will eat,
I being a vulture fit to taste such carrion." l

Suddenly he gasps for breath, and falls ; Francesco has
poisoned him. The duke dies, and the murderer is led
to torture. There are worse scenes than this ; to find
sentiments strong enough, they go to those which
change the very nature of man. Massinger puts on the
stage a father who judges and condemns his daughter,
stabbed by her husband ; Webster and Ford, a son who
assassinates his mother; Ford, the incestuous loves of
a brother and sister.2 Irresistible love overtakes them ;
the ancient love of Pasiphae and Myrrha, a kind of
madness-like enchantment, and beneath which the will
entirely gives way. Giovanni says :

" Lost ! I am lost ! My fates have doom'd my death !
The more I strive, I love ; the more I love,
The less I hope : I see my ruin certain. . . .
I have even wearied heaven with pray're, dried up

J Duke of Milan, v. 2.

2 Massinger, The Fatal Dowry ; "Webster and Ford, A late Murther
of the Sonne upon the Mother (a play not extant) ; Ford, 'Tispity she's
a Whore. See also Ford's Broken Heart, with its sublime scenes of
agony and madness.

CHAP. ii. THE THEATRE. 407

The spring of my continual tears, even starv'd
My veins with daily fasts : what wit or art
Could counsel, I have practis'd ; but, alas !
I find all these but dreams, and old men's tales,
To fright unsteady youth : I am still the same ;
Or I must speak, or burst." l

What transports follow ! what fierce and bitter joys,
and how short too, how grievous and mingled with
anguish, especially for her ! She is married to another.
Kead for yourself the admirable and horrible scene
which represents the wedding night. She is pregnant,
and Soranzo, the husband, drags her along the ground,
with curses, demanding the name of her lover :

" Come strumpet, famous whore ? . . .

Harlot, rare, notable harlot,
That with thy brazen face maintain'st thy sin,
Was there no man in Parma to be bawd
To your loose cunning whoredom else but I ?
Must your hot itch and plurisy of lust,
The heyday of your luxury, be fed
Up to a surfeit, and could none but I
Be pick'd out to be cloak to your close tricks,
Your belly-sports ? — Now I must be the dad
To all that gallimaufry that is stufFd
In thy corrupted bastard-bearing womb 1
Say, must I ?

Annabella. Beastly man ? why, 'tis thy fate.
I su'd not to thee. . . .
S. Tell me by whom."2

She gets excited, feels and cares for nothing more,
refuses to tell the name of her lover, and praises him

1 Ford's Works, ed. H. Coleridge, 1859, Tw pity she's a WTiore, i. 3.
9 Ibid iv. 3.

408 THE RENAISSANCE. BOOK n.

in the following words. This praise in the midst of
danger is like a rose she has plucked, and of which the
odour intoxicates her :

" A. Soft ! 'twas not in my bargain.
Yet somewhat, sir, to stay your longing stomach
I am content t' acquaint you with THE man,
The more than man, that got this sprightly Doy, —
(For 'tis a hoy, and therefore glory, sir,
Your heir shall be a son.)

S. Damnable monster 1

A. Nay, an you will not hear, I'll speak no more,

S. Yes, speak, and speak thy last.

A. A match, a match 1 . . .
You, why you are not worthy once to name
His name without true worship, or, indeed,
Unless you kneel'd to hear another name him.

S. What was he call'd ?

A. We are not come to that ;
Let it suffice that you shall have the glory
To father what so brave a father got. . . .

S. Dost thou laugh ?

Come, whore, tell me your lover, or, by truth
I'll hew thy flesh to shreds ; who is't 1 " l

She laughs ; the excess of shame and terror has given
her courage; she insults him, she sings; so like a
woman. !

" A. (Sings) Che morte piu dolce che morire per amore.
S. Thus will I pull thy hair, and thus I'll drag
Thy lust be-leper'd body through the dust. . . .

(Hales her up and down)
A. Be a gallant hangman. . . .

I leave revenge behind, and thou shalt feel 't. . . .

1 'Tis pity she's a Whore, iv. 3.

CHAP. ii. THE THEATRE. 409

(To Vazquez.) Pish, do not beg for me, I prize my life
As nothing ; if the man will needs be mad,
Why, let him take it." *

In the end all is discovered, and the two lovers know
they must die. For the last time, they see each other
in Annabella's chamber, listening to the noise of the
feast below which shall serve for their funeral-feast.
Giovanni, who has made his resolve like a madman, sees
Annabella richly dressed, dazzling. He regards her in
silence, and remembers the past. He weeps and says :

" These are the funeral tears,
Shed on your grave ; these furrow'd-up my cheeks
When first I lov'd and knew not how to woo. . . .
Give me your hand : how sweetly life doth run
In these well-colour'd veins ! How constantly
These palms do promise health ! . . .
Kiss me again, forgive me. . . . Farewell." 2. . . .

He then stabs her, enters the banqueting room, with her
heart upon his dagger :

" Soranzo see this heart, which was thy wife's.
Thus I exchange it royally for thine." 3

He kills him, and casting himself on the swords of
banditti, dies. It would seem that tragedy could go
no further.

But it did go further ; for if these are melodramas,
they are sincere, composed, not like those of to-day, by
Grub Street writers for peaceful citizens, but by impas-
sioned men, experienced in tra,gical arts, for a violent,
over-fed melancholy race. From Shakspeare to Milton,
Swift, Hogarth, no race has been more glutted with coarse

1 'Tispity she's a WTiore, iv. 3. 2 Ibid. v. 5. 3 Ibid, v 0.

410 THE RENAISSANCE. BOOK u,

expressions and horrors, and its poets supply them plenti-
fully ; Ford less so than Webster ; the latter a sombre
man, whose thoughts seem incessantly to be haunting
tombs and charnel-houses. " Places in court," he says,
are but like beds in the hospital, where this man's head
lies at that man's foot, and so lower and lower." l Such
are his images. No one has equalled Webster in creat-
ing desperate characters, utter wretches, bitter misan-
thropes,2 in blackening and blaspheming human life,
above all, in depicting the shameless depravity and
refined ferocity of Italian manners.3 The Duchess of
Malfi has secretly married her steward Antonio, and
her brother learns that she has children ; almost mad4
with rage and wounded pride, he remains silent, wait-
ing until he knows the name of the father; then he
arrives all of a sudden, means to kill her, but so that
she shall taste the lees of death. She must suffer much,
but above all, she must not die too quickly ! She must
suffer in mind ; these griefs are worse than the body's.
He sends assassins to kill Antonio, and meanwhile comes
to her in the dark, with affectionate words ; pretends to

1 Webster's Works, ed. Dyce, 1857, Duchess of Malfi, i. 1.

2 The characters of Bosola, Flaminio.

3 See Stendhal Chronicles of Italy, The Cenci, The Duchess of Pal-
liano, and all the biographies of the time ; of the Borgias, of Bianca
Capello, of Vittoria Accoramboni.

4 Ferdinand, one of the brothers, says (ii. 5) :

" I would have their bodies
Burnt in a coal-pit with the ventage stopp'd,
That their curs'd smoke might not ascend to heaven ; .
Or dip the sheets they lie in in pitch or sulphur,
Wrap them in't, and then light them as a match ;
Or else to-boil their bastard to a cullis,
And give't his lecherous father to renew
The sin of his back."

CHAP. ii. THE THEATRE. 411

be reconciled, and suddenly shows her waxen figures,
covered with wounds, whom she takes for her slaughtered
husband and children. She staggers under the blow,
and remains in gloom without crying out. Then she
says :

" Good comfortable fellow,
Persuade a wretch that's broke upon the wheel
To have all his bones new set ; entreat him live
To be executed again. Who must despatch me 1 . .

Bosola. Come, be of comfort, I will save your life.

Duchess, Indeed, I have not leisure to tend
So small a business.

B. Now, by my life, I pity you.

D. Thou art a fool, then,
To waste thy pity on a thing so wretched
As cannot pity itself. I am full of daggers." 1

Slow words, spoken in a whisper, as in a dream, or as
if she were speaking of a third person. Her brother
sends to her a company of madmen, who leap and howl
and rave around her in mournful wise ; a pitiful sight,
calculated to unseat the reason ; a kind of foretaste of
hell She says nothing, looking upon them ; her heart
is dead, her eyes fixed, with vacant stare :

Cariola. What think you of, madam 1

Duchess. Of nothing :
When I muse thus, I sleep.

G. Like a madman, with your eyes open ?

D. Dost thou think we shall know one another
In the other world 1

G. Yes, out of question.

D. 0 that it were possible we might
But hold some two days' conference with the dead !

1 Duchess of Malfr iv. 1.

412 . THE RENAISSANCE. BOOK u

From them I should learn somewhat, I am sure,

I never shall know here. I'll tell thee a miracle ;

I am not mad yet, to my cause of sorrow :

The heaven o'er my head seems made of molten brass,

The earth of flaming sulphur, yet I am not mad.

I am acquainted with sad misery

As the tann'd galley-slave is with his oar." 1 . . .

In this state, the limbs, like those of one who has been
newly executed, still quiver, but the sensibility is worn
out; the miserable body only stirs mechanically; it
has suffered too much. At last the gravedigger comes
with executioners, a coffin, and they sing before her a
funeral dirge :

"Duchess. Farewell, Cariola . . .
I pray thee, look thou giv'st my little boy
Some syrup for his cold, and let the girl
Say her prayers ere she sleep. — Now, what you please :
What death ?

Bosola. Strangling; here are your executioners.
D. I forgive them :

The apoplexy, catarrh, or cough o' the lungs
Would do as much as they do. . . . My body
Bestow upon my women, will you 1 . . .
Go, tell my brothers, when I am laid out,
They then may feed in quiet." 2

After the mistress the maid ; the latter cries and
struggles :

" Cariola. I will not die ; I must not ; I am contracted
To a young gentleman.

1st Executioner. Here's your wedding ring.

1 Duchess ofMalfi, iv. 2. 2 Ibid.

CIIAP. ii. THE THEATKE. 413

G. If you kill me now,
I am damn'd. I have not been at confession
This two years.

B. When?1

C. I am quick with child." 2

They strangle her also, and the two children of the
duchess. Antonio is assassinated; the cardinal and
his mistress, the duke and his confidant, are poisoned
or butchered; and the solemn words of the dying, in
the midst of this butchery, utter, as from funereal
trumpets, a general curse upon existence :

" We are only like dead walls or vaulted graves,
That, ruin'd yield no echo. Fare you well. .•£ jy.

0, this gloomy world !
In what a shadow, or deep pit of darkness,
Doth womanish and fearful mankind live ! " 3

" In all our quest of greatness,
Like wanton boys, whose pastime is their care,
We follow after bubbles blown in the air.
Pleasure of life, what is't ? only the good hours
Of an ague ; merely a preparative to rest,
To endure vexation. . ..». r
Whether we fall by ambition, blood, or lust,
Like diamonds, we are cut with our own dust."4

You will find nothing sadder or greater from the Edda
to Lord Byron.

We can well imagine what powerful characters are
necessary to sustain these terrible dramas. All these
personages are ready for extreme acts; their resolves
break forth like blows of a sword ; we follow, meet at

1 "When," an exclamation ol impatience, equivalent to "make
haste," very common among the old English dramatists. — TR.
2 Duchess* of Malfi, iv. 2. ' Ibid. v. 5. * Hid. v. 4 and 5.

414 THE RENAISSANCE. BOOK n.

every change of scene their glowing eyes, wan lips, the
starting of their muscles, the tension of their whole
frame. Their powerful will contracts their violent
hands, and their accumulated passion breaks out in
thunder-bolts, which tear and ravage all around them,
and in their own hearts. We know them, the heroes
of this tragic population, lago, Kichard III., Lady Mac-
beth, Othello, Coriolanus, Hotspur, full of genius, courage,
desire, generally mad or criminal, always self-driven to
the tomb. There are as many around Shakspeare as
in his own works. Let me exhibit one character more,
written by the same dramatist, Webster. No one,
except Shakspeare, has seen further into the depths of
diabolical and unchained nature. The " White Devil "
is the name which he gives to his" heroine. His
Vittoria Corombona receives as her lover the Duke of
Brachiano, and at the first interview dreams of the issue :

" To pass away the time, I'll tell your grace
A dream I had last night."

It is certainly well related, and still better chosen, of
deep meaning and very clear import. Her brother
Flaminio says, aside :

" Excellent devil ! she hath taught him in a dream
To make away his duchess and her husband." l

So, her husband, Camillo, is strangled, the Duchess
poisoned, and Vittoria, accused of the two crimes, is
brought before the tribunal. Step by step, like a soldier
brought to bay with his back against a wall, she defends
herself, refuting and defying advocates and judges,
incapable of blenching or quailing, clear in mind, ready

1 Vittvria Corombona, i. 2.

CHAP. ii. THE THEATRE. 415

in word, amid insults and proofs, even menaced with
death on the scaffold. The advocate begins to speak
in Latin.

" Vittwia. Pray my lord, let him speak his usual tongue ;
I'll make no answer else.

Francisco de Med-icis. Why, you understand Latin.
V. I do, sir ; but amongst this auditory
Which come to hear niy cause, the half or more
May be ignorant in't."

She wants a duel, bare-breasted, in open day, and chal-
lenges the advocate :

" I am at the mark, sir : I'll give aim to you,
And tell you how near you shoot."

She mocks his legal phraseology, insults him, with
biting irony :

" Surely, my lords, this lawyer here hath swallow'd
Some pothecaries' bills, or proclamations ;
And now the hard and undigestible words
Come up, like stones we use give hawks for physic :
Why, this is Welsh to Latin."

Then, to the strongest adjuration of the judges :

" To the point,

Find me but guilty, sever head from body,
We'll part good friends ; I scorn to hold my life
At yours, or any man's entreaty, sir. . . .
These are but feigned shadows of my evils :
Terrify babes, my lord, with painted devils ;
I am past such needless palsy. For your names
Of whore and murderess, they proceed from you,
As if a man should spit against the wind ;
The filth returns in's face." l
1 Webster Dyce, 1857, Vtttoria Corombona, p. 20-2L

416 THE RENAISSANCE. BOOK u.

Argument for argument: she has a parry for every
blow : a parry and a thrust :

" But take you your course: it seems you have beggar'd me first,
And now would fain undo me. I have houses,
Jewels, and a poor remnant of crusadoes :
Would those would make you charitable ! "

Then, in a harsher voice :

" In faith, my lord, you might go pistol flies ;
The sport would be more noble."

They condemn her to be shut up in a house of con-
vertites :

" F. A house of con vertites ! What's that ?

Monticelso. A house of penitent whores.

V. Do the noblemen in Rome
Erect it for their wives, that I am sent
To lodge there ?" l

The sarcasm comes home like a sword-thrust; then
another behind it; then cries and curses. She will
not bend, she will not weep. She goes off erect, bitter
and more haughty than ever :

" I will not weep ;

No, I do scorn to call up one poor tear
To fawn on your injustice :- bear me hence
Unto this house of — . what's your mitigating title ?

Mont. Of convertites.

V. It shall not be a house ot convertites ;
My mind shall make it honester to me
Than the Pope's palace, and more peaceable
Than thy soul, though thou art a cardinal." 2

1 Vittoria, Corvmbona, iii. 2, p. 23. a Ibid. p. 24.

OHAP. ii. THE THEATRE. 417

Against her furious lover, who accuses her of unfaith-
fulness, she is as strong as against her judges; she
copes with him, casts in his teeth the death of his
duchess, forces him to beg pardon, to many her; she
will play the comedy to the end, at the pistol's mouth,
with the shamelessness and courage of a courtesan and
an empress;1 snared at last, she will be just as brave
and more insulting when the dagger's point threatens
her:

" Yes, I shall welcome death

As princes do some great ambassadors ;

I'll meet thy weapon half way. . . . 'Twas a manly blow ;

The next thou giv'st, murder some sucking infant ;

And then thou wilt be famous." 2

When a woman unsexes herself, her actions transcend
man's, and there is nothing which she will not suffer
or dare.

VII.

Opposed to this band of tragic characters, with their
distorted features, brazen fronts, combative attitudes,
is a troop of sweet and timid figures, pre-eminently
tender-hearted, the most graceful and loveworthy, whom
it has been given to man to depict. In Shakspeare
you will meet them in Miranda, Juliet, Desdemona,
Virgilia, Ophelia, Cordelia, Imogen; but they abound
also in the others ; and it is a characteristic of the race
to have furnished them, as it is of the drama to have
represented them. By a singular coincidence, the
women are more of women, the men more of men, here
than elsewhere. The two natures go each to its ex-

* Compare Mme. Marneffe in Balzac's La Cousiw Bcttc,

2 Vittoria Corombona, v. last scene, pp. 49-50.
VOL. I. 2 E

418 THE RENAISSANCE. BOOK n.

treme : in tlie one to boldness, the spirit of enterprise
and resistance, the warlike, imperious, and unpolished
character ; in the other to sweetness, devotion, patience,
inextinguishable affection,1 — a thing unknown in dis-
tant lands, in France especially so : a woman in
England gives herself without drawing back, and places
her glory and duty in obedience, forgiveness, adoration,
wishing and professing only to be melted and absorbed
daily deeper and deeper in him whom she has freely
and for ever chosen.2 It is this, an old German instinct,
which these great painters of instinct diffuse here, one
and all : Penthea, Dorothea, in Ford and Greene ;
Isabella and the Duchess of Main, in Webster ; Bianca,
Ordella, Arethusa, Juliana, Euphrasia, Amoret, and
others, in Beaumont and Fletcher : there are a score of
them who, under the severest tests and the strongest
temptations, display this wonderful power of self-aban-
donment and devotion.3 The soul, in this race, is at
once primitive and serious. Women keep their purity
longer than elsewhere. They lose respect less quickly ;
weigh worth and characters less suddenly : they are
less apt to think evil, and to take the measure of their
husbands. To this day, a great lady, accustomed
to company, blushes in the presence of an unknown

1 Hence the happiness and strength of the marriage tie. In France
it is but an association of two comrades, tolerably alike and tolerably
equal, which gives rise to endless disturbance and bickering.

2 See the representation of this character throughout English and
German literature. Stendhal, an acute observer, saturated with Italian
and French morals and ideas, is astonished at this phenomenon. He
understands nothing of this kind of devotion, "this slavery which
English husbands have had the wit to impose on their wives under the
name of duty." These are "the manners of a seraglio." See also
Corinne, by Madame de Stael.

3 A perfect woman already : meek and patient. — HEYWOO.D.

FRANCIS BEAUMONT.

CHAP. u. THE THEATRE. 419

man, and feels bashful like a little girl : the blue eyes
are dropt, and a child-like shame flies to her rosy cheeks.
English women have not the smartness, the boldness of
ideas, the assurance of bearing, the precocity, which
with the French make of a young girl, in six months,
a woman of intrigue and the queen of a drawing-room.1
Domestic life and obedience are more easy to them.
More pliant and more sedentary, they are at the same
time more concentrated and introspective, more disposed
to follow the noble dream called duty, which is hardly
generated in mankind but by silence of the senses.
They are not tempted by the voluptuous sweetness
which in southern countries is breathed out in the
climate, in the sky, in the general spectacle of things ;
which dissolves every obstacle, which causes privation
to be looked upon as a snare and virtue as a theory.
They can rest content with dull sensations, dispense
with excitement, endure weariness ; and in this mono-
tony of a regulated existence, fall back upon themselves,
obey a pure idea, employ all the strength of their hearts
in maintaining their moral dignity. Thus supported
by innocence and conscience, they introduce into love
a profound and upright sentiment, abjure coquetry,
vanity, and flirtation: they do not lie nor simper.
When they love, they are not tasting a forbidden fruit,
but are binding themselves for their whole life. Thus
understood, love becomes almost a holy thing; the
spectator no longer wishes to be spiteful or to jest ;
women do not think of their own happiness, but of
that of the loved ones ; they aim not at pleasure, but

1 See, by way of contrast, all Moliere's women, so French ; even
Agnes and little Louison.

420 THE RENAISSANCE. BOOK n.

at devotion. Euphrasia, relating her history to Phil-
aster, says :

" My father oft would speak
Your worth and virtue ; and, as I did grow
More and more apprehensive, I did thirst
To see the man so prais'd ; but yet all this
Was but a maiden longing, to be lost
As soon as found ; till sitting in my window,
Printing my thoughts in lawn, I saw a god,
I thought, (but it was you) enter our gates.
My blood flew out, and back again as fast,
As I had puft'd it forth and suck'd it in
Like breath : Then was I call'd away in haste
To entertain you. Never was a man,
Heav'd from a sheep-cote to a sceptre, rais'd
So high in thoughts as I : You left a kiss
Upon these lips then, which I mean to keep
From you for ever. I did hear you talk,
Far above singing ! After you were gone,
I grew acquainted with my heart, and search'd
What stirr'd it so : Alas ! I found it love ;
Yet far from lust ; for could I but have liv'd
In presence of you, I had had my end." *

She had disguised herself as a page,2 followed him, was
his servant ; what greater happiness for a woman than
to serve on her knees the man she loves ? She
let him scold her, threaten her with death, wound her.

" Blest be that hand !
It meant me well. Again, for pity's sake ! " 3

Do what he will, nothing but words of tenderness and

1 Beaumont and Fletcher, Works, ed. G. Colman, 3 vols., 1811,
Philaster, v.

2 Like Kaled in Byron's Lara. 3 Fhilastvr, ir.

CHAP. ii. THE THEATKE. 421

adoration can proceed from this heart, these wan lips.
Moreover, she takes upon herself a crime of which he is
accused, contradicts him when he asserts his guilt, is
ready to die in his place. Still more, she is of use to
him with the Princess Arethusa, whom he loves ; she
justifies her rival, brings about their marriage, and asks
no other thanks but that she may serve them botL
And strange to say, the princess is not jealous.

" Euphrasia. Never, Sir, will I

Marry ; it is a thing within my vow :
But if I may have leave to serve the princess,
To see the virtues of her lord and her,
I shall have hope to live.

Arethusa. . . . Come, live with me ;

Live free as I do. She that loves my lord,
Curst be the wife that hates her ! " 1

What notion of love have they in this country?
Whence happens it that all selfishness, all vanity, all
rancour, every little feeling, either personal or base, flees
at its approach ? How comes it that the soul is given
up wholly, without hesitation, without reserve, and only
dreams thenceforth of prostrating and annihilating itself,
as in the presence of a god ? Biancha, thinking Cesario
ruined, offers herself to him as his wife ; and learning
that he is not so, gives him up straightway, without a
murmur :

" Biancha. So dearly I respected both your fame
And quality, that I would first have perish'd
In my sick thoughts, than e'er have given consent
To have undone your fortunes, by inviting
A marriage with so mean a one as I am :

1 Philaster, v.

422 THE RENAISSANCE. BOOK it

I should have died sure, and no creature known

The sickness that had kill'd me. ... Now since I know

There is no difference 'twixt your birth and mine.

Not much 'twixt our estates (if any be,

The advantage is on my side) I come willingly

To tender you the first-fruits of my heart.

And am content t' accept you for my husband,

Now when you are at lowest . . .

Cesario. Why, Biancha,

Report has cozen'd thee ; I am not fallen
From my expected honours or possessions,
Tho' from the hope of birth-right.

B Are you not 1

Then I am lost again ! I have a suit too ;
You'll grant it, if you be a good man. . . .
Pray do not talk of aught what I have said t'ye. . .

. . . Pity me ;

But never love me more ! . . . I'll pray for you,
That you may have a virtuous wife, a fair one ;
And when I'm dead ... C. Fy, fy ! B. Think on me

sometimes,

With mercy for this trespass ! C. Let us kiss
At parting, as at coming ! B. This I have
As a free dower to a virgin's grave,
All goodness dwell with you ! " l

Isabella, Brachiano's duchess is betrayed, insulted by
her faithless husband ; to shield him from tbe vengeance
of her family, she takes upon herself the blame of the
rupture, purposely plays the shrew, and leaving him at
peace with his courtesan, dies embracing his picture.
Arethusa allows herself to be wounded by Philaster,
stays the people who would hold back the murderer's
arm, declares that he has done nothing, that it is not

1 Beaumont and Fletcher, The Fair Maid of the Inn, iv.

CHAP. ii. THE THEATRE. 423

he, prays for him, loves him in spite of all, even to the
end, as though all his acts were sacred, as if he had
power of life and death over her. Ordella devotes her-
self, that the king, her husband, may have children;1
she offers herself for a sacrifice, simply, without grand
words, with her whole heart :

" Ordella. Let it be what it may then, what it dare,
I have a mind will hazard it.

Thierry. But, hark you ;

What may that woman merit, makes this blessing 1

0. Only her duty, sir. T. 'Tis terrible !

0. 'Tis so much the more noble.

T. 'Tis full of fearful shadows ! 0. So is sleep, sir,
Or anything that's merely ours, and mortal ;
We were begotten gods else : but those fears,
Feeling but once the fires of nobler thoughts,
Fly, like the shapes of clouds we form, to nothing

T. Suppose it death ! 0. I do. T. And endless parting
With all we can call ours, with all our sweetness,
With youth, strength, pleasure, people, time, nay reason 1
For in the silent grave, no conversation,
No joyful tread of friends, no voice of lovers,
No careful father's counsel, nothing's heard,
Nor nothing is, but all oblivion,
Dust and an endless darkness : and dare you, woman,
Desire this place ? 0. 'Tis of all sleeps the sweetest :
Children begin it to us, strong men seek it,
And kings from height of all their painted glories
Fall, like spent exhalations, to this centre. . . .

T. Then you can suffer 1 0. As willingly as say it.

T. Martell, a wonder !
Here is a woman that dares die. — Yet, tell me,

J Beaumont and Fletcher, Thierry and Theodoret, The Mai*?*
Tragedy, Philaster. See also the part of Lucina in Valentinian.

424 THE RENAISSANCE. BOOK IT.

Are you a wife? 0. I am, sir. T. And have children? —
She sighs and weeps ! 0. Oh, none, sir. T. Dare you venture
For a poor barren praise you ne'er shall hear,
To part with these sweet hopes 1 0. With all but Heaven." l

Is not this prodigious ? Can you understand how one
human being can thus be separated from herself, forget
and lose herself in another? They do so lose them-
selves, as in an abyss. When they love in vain and
without hope, neither reason nor life resist ; they lan-
guish, grow mad, die like Ophelia. Aspasia, forlorn,

" Walks discontented, with her watry eyes
Bent on the earth. The unfrequented woods
Are her delight ; and when she sees a bank
Stuck full of flowers, she with a sigh will tell
Her servants what a pretty place it were
To bury lovers in ; and make her maids
Pluck 'em, and strew her over like a corse.
She carries with her an infectious grief,
That strikes all her beholders ; she will sing
The niournful'st things that ever ear hath heard,
And sigh and sing again ; and when the rest
Of our young ladies, in their wanton blood,
Tell mirthful tales in course, that fill the room
With laughter, she will with so sad a look
Bring forth a story of the silent death
Of some forsaken virgin, which her grief
Will put in such a phrase, that, ere she end,
She'll send them weeping one by one away." 2

Like a spectre about a tomb, she wanders for ever about
the remains of her destroyed love, languishes, grows pale,
swoons, ends by causing herself to be killed. Sadder

1 Thierry and Theodoret, iv. 1.
a Beaumont and Fletcher, The Maid's Tragedy, i

CHAP. ii. THE THEATRE. 425

still are those who, from duty or submission, allow
themselves to be married, while their heart belongs to
another. They are not resigned, do not recover, like
Pauline in Polyeucte. They are crushed to death. Pen-
thea, in Ford's Broken Heart, is as upright, but not so
strong, as Pauline ; she is the English wife, not the
Eoman, stoical and calm.1 She despairs, sweetly,
silently, and pines to death. In her innermost heart
she holds herself married to him to whom she has
pledged her soul : it is the marriage of the heart which
in her eyes is alone genuine ; the other is only disguised
adultery. In marrying Bassanes she has sinned against
Orgilus ; moral infidelity is worse than legal infidelity,
and thenceforth she is fallen in her own eyes. She says
to her brother :

" Pray, kill me. ...
Kill, me, pray ; nay, will ye 1

Ithocles. How does thy lord esteem thee 1 P. Such an one
As only you have made me ; a faith-breaker,
A spotted whore ; forgive me, I am one —
In act, not in desires, the gods must witness. . .
For she that's wife to Orgilus, and lives
In known adultery with Bassanes,
Is, at the best, a whore. Wilt kill me now ? . .
The handmaid to the wages
Of country toil, drinks the untroubled streams

1 Pauline says, in Corneille's Polyeucte (iii. 2) :

" Avant qu'abandonner mon ame a raes douleurs,
II me faut essayer la force de mes pleurs ;
En qualite" de femme cm de fille, j'espere
Qu'ils vaincront un epoux, ou flechiront un pere.
Que si sur 1'un et 1'autre ils manquent de pouvoir,
Je ne prendrai conseil que de mon desespoir.
Apprends-moi cependant ce qu'ils ont fait au temple."

We could not find a more reasonable and reasoning woman. So '.vith

Eliante, and Hemiette, in Moliere.

426 THE RENAISSANCE. BOOK IL

With leaping kids, and with the bleating lambs,
And so allays her thirst secure ; whiles I
Quench my hot sighs with fleetings of my tears."1

With tragic greatness, from the height of her incurable
grief, she throws her gaze on life :

" My glass of life, sweet princess, hath few minutes
Remaining to run down ; the sands are spent ;
For by an inward messenger I feel

The summons of departure short and certain. . . Glories
Of human greatness are but pleasing dreams,
And shadows soon decaying ; on the stage
Of my mortality, my youth hath acted
Some scenes of vanity, drawn out at length
By varied pleasures, sweeten'd in the mixture,
But tragical in issue. . . . That remedy
Must be a winding-sheet, a fold of lead,
And some untrod-on corner in the earth."2

There is no revolt, no bitterness ; she affectionately as-
sists her brother who has caused her unhappiness ; she
tries to enable him to win the woman he loves ; femi-
nine kindness and sweetness overflow in her in the
depths of her despair. Love here is not despotic,
passionate, as in southern climes. It is only deep and
sad; the source of life is dried up, that is all; she
lives no longer, because she cannot ; all go by degrees
— health, reason, soul; in the end she becomes mad,
and behold her dishevelled, with wide staring eyes, with
words that can hardly find utterance. For ten days
she has not slept, and will not eat any more ; and the
same fatal thought continually afflicts her heart, amidst
vague dreams of maternal tenderness and happiness

1 Ford's Broken Heart, iii. 2. 2 Ibid. iii. 5.

CHAP. ii. THE THEATRE. 427

brought to nought, which come and go in her mind like
phantoms :

" Sure, if we were all sirens, we should sing pitifully,
And 'twere a comely music, when in parts
One sung another's knell ; the turtle sighs
When he hath lost his mate ; and yet some say
He must be dead first : 'tis a fine deceit
To pass away in a dream ! indeed, I've slept
With mine eyes open, a great while. No falsehood
Equals a broken faith ; there's not a hair
Sticks on my head, but, like a leaden plummet,
It sinks me to the grave : I must creep thither ;
The journey is not long. . . .
Since I was first a wife, I might have been
Mother to many pretty prattling babes ;
They would have smiled when I smiled ; and, for certain,
I should have cried when they cried : — truly, brother,
My father would have pick'd me out a husband,
And then my little ones had been no bastards ;
But 'tis too late for me to marry now,
I am past child-bearing ; 'tis not my fault. . . .

Spare your hand ;
Believe me, I'll not hurt it. ...
Complain not though I wring it hard : I'll kiss it ;
Oh, 'tis a fine soft palm ! — hark, in thine ear ;
Like whom do I look, prithee 1 — nay, no whispering.
Goodness ! we had been happy ; too much happiness
Will make folk proud, they say. . . .
There is no peace left for a ravish'd wife,
Widow'd by lawless marriage ; to all memory
Penthea's, poor Penthea's name is strumpeted. . . .
Forgive me ; Oh ! I faint." 1

She dies, imploring that some gentle voice may sing bet

1 Ford's Broken Heart, iv. 2.

428 THE RENAISSANCE. BOOK n

a plaintive air, a farewell ditty, a sweet funeral song.
I know nothing in the drama more pure and touching.
When we find a constitution of soul so new, and
capable of such great effects, it behoves us to look at
the bodies. Man's extreme actions come not from his
will, but his nature.1 In order to understand the great
tensions of the whole machine, we must look upon the
whole machine, — I mean man's temperament, the man-
ner in which his blood flows, his nerves quiver, his
muscles act: the moral interprets the physical, and human
qualities have their root in the animal species. Consider
then the species in this case — namely, the race ; for the
sisters of Shakspeare's Ophelia and Virgilia, Goethe's Clara
and Margaret, Otway's Belvidera, Eichardson's Pamela,
constitute a race by themselves, soft and fair, with blue
eyes, lily whiteness, blushing, of timid delicacy, serious
sweetness, framed to yield, bend, cling. Their poets
feel it clearly when they bring them on the stage ; they
surround them with the poetry which becomes them,
the murmur of streams, the pendent willow-tresses, the
frail and humid flowers of the country, so like them-
selves :

" The flower, that's like thy face, pale primrose, uor
The azure harebell, like thy veins ; no, nor
The leaf of eglantine, whom not to slander,
Out-sweeten'd not thy breath." 2

They make them sweet, like the south wind, which with
its gentle breath causes the violets to bend their heads,

1 Schopenhauer, Metaphysics of Love and Death. Swift also said
that death and love are the two things in which man is fundamen tally
irrational. In fact, it is the species and the instinct which are displayed
in them, not the will and the individual.

3 Cymbeline, iv. 2.

JOHN FLETCHER.

CHAP. 11. THE THEATRE. 429

abashed at the slightest reproach, already half bowed
down by a tender and dreamy melancholy.1 Philaster,
speaking of Euphrasia, whom he takes to be a page, and
who has disguised herself in order to be near him,
says :

" Hunting the buck,
I found him sitting by a fountain-side,
Of which he borrow'd some to quench his thirst,
And paid the nymph again as much in tears.
A garland lay him by, made by himself,
Of many several flowers, bred in the bay,
Stuck in that mystic order, that the rareness
Delighted me : But ever when he turn'd
His tender eyes upon 'em, he would weep,
As if he meant to make 'em grow again.
Seeing such pretty helpless innocence
Dwell in his face, I asked him all his story.
He told me, that his parents gentle dy'd,
Leaving him to the mercy of the fields,
Which gave him roots ; and of the crystal springs,
Which did not stop their courses ; and the sun,
Which still, he thank'd him, yielded him his light.
Then he took up his garland, and did shew
What every flower, as country people hold,
Did signify ; and how all, order'd thus,
Express'd his grief : And, to my thoughts, did read
The prettiest lecture of his country art
That could be wish'd. ... I gladly entertain'd him,
Who was as glad to follow ; and have got
The trustiest, loving'st, and the gentlest boy
That ever master kept."2

The idyl is self-produced among these human flowers :
the dramatic action is stopped before the angelic sweet-

1 The death of Ophelia, the obsequies of Imogen. - Pliilatsier. i

430 THE RENAISSANCE. BOOK n.

iiess of their tenderness and modesty. Sometimes even
the idyl is born complete and pure, and the whole
theatre is occupied by a sentimental and poetical land of
opera. There are two or three such plays in Shakspeare ;
in rude Jonson, The Sad Shepherd; in Fletcher, The
Faithful Shepherdess. Bidiculous titles nowadays, for
they remind us of the interminable platitudes of d'TIrfe",
or the affected conceits of Florian ; charming titles, if
we note the sincere and overflowing poetry which they
contain. Amoret, the faithful shepherdess, lives in an
imaginary country, full of old gods, yet English, like
the dewy verdant landscapes in which Rubens sets his
nymphs dancing:

" Thro' yon same bending plain
That flings his arms down to the main,
And thro* these thick woods, have I run,
Whose bottom never kiss'd the sun
Since the lusty spring began." . . .

" For to that holy wood is consecrate
A virtuous well, about whose flow'ry banks
The nimble-footed fairies dance their rounds,
By the pale moon-shine, dipping oftentimes
Their stolen children, so to make them free
From dying flesh, and dull mortality." . . . l

" See the dew-drops, how they kiss
Ev'ry little flower that is ;
Hanging on their velvet heads,
Like a rope of christal beads.
See the heavy clouds low falling,
And bright Hesperus down calling
The dead Night from underground." 2

1 Beaumont and Fletcher, The Faithful Shepherdess, i 2 Ibid it

CHAP. IT THE THEATRE. 431

These are the plants and the aspects of the ever fresh
English country, now enveloped in a pale diaphanous
mist, now glistening under the absorbing sun, teeming
with grasses so full of sap, so delicate, that in the midst
of their most brilliant splendour and their most luxuri-
ant life, we feel that to-morrow will wither them. There,
on a summer night, the young men and girls, after their
custom,1 go to gather flowers and plight their troth.
Amoret and Perigot are together; Arnoret,

" Fairer far

Thau the chaste blushing morn, or that fair star
That guides the wand'ring seaman thro' the deep,"

modest like a virgin, and tender as a wife, says to
Perigot :

" I do believe thee : 'Tis as hard for me
To think thee false, and harder, than for thee
To hold me foul." 2

Strongly as she is tried, her heart, once given, never
draws back. Perigot, deceived, driven to despair, per-
suaded that she is unchaste, strikes her with his sword,
and casts her bleeding to the ground. The " sullen shep-
herd " throws her into a well ; but the god lets fall " a
drop from his watery locks " into the wound ; the
chaste flesh closes at the touch of the divine water, and
the maiden, recovering, goes once more in search of him

she loves :

" Speak, if thou be here,
My Perigot ! Thy Amoret, thy dear,
Calls on thy loved name. . . . Tis thy friend,
Thy Amoret ; come hither, to give end

» See the description in Nathan Drake, Shakspcarc and hit Tun*.
2 Beaumont and Fletcher, The Faithful Shepherd*** L

432 THE RENAISSANCE. BOOK n

To these consumings. Look up, gentle boy,

I have forgot those pains and dear annoy

I suffer'd for thy sake, and am content

To be thy love again. Why hast thou rent

Those curled locks, where I have often hung

Ribbons, and damask-roses, and have flung

Waters distill'd to make thee fresh and gay,

Sweeter than nosegays on a bridal day ?

Why dost thou cross thine arms, and hang thy face

Down to thy bosom, letting fall apace,

From those two little Heav'ns, upon the ground,

Show'rs of more price, more orient, and more round,

Than those that hang upon the moon's pale brow 1

Cease these complainings, shepherd ! I am now

The same I ever was, as kind and free,

And can forgive before you ask of me :

Indeed, I can and will." l

Who could resist her sweet and sad smile ? Still de-
ceived, Perigot wounds her again ; she falls, but without
anger.

" So this work hath end !

Farewell, and live ! be constant to thy friend

That loves thee next." 2

A nymph cures her, and at last Perigot, disabused, comes
and throws himself on his knees before her. She
stretches out her arms ; in spite of all that he had done,
she was not changed :

" I am thy love,

Thy Anioret, for evermore thy love !
Strike once more on my naked breast, I'll prove
As constant still. Oh, could'st thou love me yet,
How soon could I my former griefs forget ! " 3

1 The Faithful Shepherdess, iv. 2 Ibid.

3 Ibid. v. Compare, as an illustration of the contrast of races, the
Italian pastorals, Tasso's Aminla, Guarmi's II Pastor fido, etc.

CHAP. ii. THE THEATKE. 433

Such are the touching and poetical figures which these
poets introduce in thoir dramas, or in connection with
their dramas, amidst murders, assassinations, the clash
of swords, the howl of slaughter, striving against the
raging men who adore or torment them, like them car-
ried to excess, transported by their tenderness as the
others by their violence; it is a complete exposition,
as well as a perfect opposition of the feminine instinct
ending in excessive self-abandonment, and of masculine
harshness ending in murderous inflexibility. Thus built
up and thus provided, the drama of the age was
enabled to bring out the inner depths of man, and to
set in motion the most powerful human emotions ; to
bring upon the stage Hamlet and Lear, Ophelia and
Cordelia, the death of Desdemona and the butcheries of
Macbeth.

END OF VOL. I.

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